Developing Sustainable Competitive Intelligence Capabilities Through Virtual Reality and Experiential Learning: A Technology Acceptance-Based Framework

Abstract

Purpose: To position Competitive Intelligence (CI) as the epistemological axis of a proposed VR-experiential learning framework for Sustainable Competitive Intelligence (SCI), and to ground the framework's acceptance-related design parameters in an empirical needs assessment of undergraduate students' technology acceptance.

Methodology/approach: Secondary quantitative analysis of a validated Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) survey of 150 Chinese undergraduate students, using descriptive statistics, composite reliability and discriminant validity analysis, correlation, OLS regression with full diagnostic testing, and a sensitivity analysis of the item-coding decision.

Originality/Relevance: Competitive Intelligence education research offers limited empirical guidance on immersive instructional design; this study develops a conceptual matrix linking a VR-experiential learning framework to every stage of the CI cycle, explicitly distinguishing this conceptual contribution from its bounded empirical evidence on general VR acceptance.

Key findings: Attitude, perceived usefulness, and innovativeness significantly predicted behavioral intention to adopt VR (R² = .32); perceived ease of use did not. Prior VR experience raised perceived ease of use but lowered behavioral intention. All constructs met composite reliability, average variance extracted, and discriminant validity thresholds.

Theoretical/methodological contributions: The study integrates the CI cycle, dynamic capabilities, and Kolb's experiential learning cycle into a stage-by-stage conceptual matrix, and demonstrates, using the original instrument's item wording as documentary evidence, why raw item coding rather than codebook-reversed coding was retained.