Metaverse Meets Management: A Modular Approach to Augment Management Practices With Augmented and Virtual Reality

Practitioners in strategic management often struggle to address the complexities of strategic planning, leading many companies to adopt digital tools to improve their decision-making practices. The metaverse paradigm of merging physical and digital worlds offers a promising platform for a deeper integration of digital capabilities into these processes. Metaverse interfaces like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will play a critical role in making this integration possible. Yet, their potential in strategic management remains largely unexplored. This led to a lack of understanding of how immersive technologies can be utilized in the field, particularly in overcoming cognitive limitations associated with decision-making. This study addresses the gap with a twofold contribution. First, it leverages the concept of technology affordances to clarify the potential of AR and VR in mitigating cognitive bottlenecks. By examining the features of contemporary immersive tools, this research identifies cognitive affordances enabled by AR and VR and shows how these affordances can address cognitive limitations. Secondly, the study introduces a modular design toolkit for practitioners to create AR/VR applications tailored to their needs. We demonstrate our findings through practical examples and discuss managerial implications of adopting metaverse interfaces in organizational settings, as well as the potential downsides of their implementation.

Keywords: Metaverse, augmented reality, virtual reality, decisionmaking, strategic management, technology affordances, technology features

Authors: Nicola Felicini, Letizia Mortara

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