With the rapid development of emerging digital technologies, efficient opportunity iteration is of great significance for the survival and development of digital startups. However, the current research on entrepreneurial opportunities mainly focuses on the formation of opportunities before the establishment of enterprises. Few scholars have explored the mechanism of opportunity iteration after the establishment of enterprises, and there are very few relevant empirical studies embedded in the context of digital entrepreneurship. In view of this, this paper constructs a moderated mediation model to investigate how to stimulate the opportunity iteration behaviors of digital startups based on the organizational learning theory and the social construct theory.

The study is conducted in the form of questionnaire, mainly using validated scales developed into question items. After a pre-survey, from December 2021 to February 2022, it carries out formal research work by combining online and offline methods, distributes a total of 324 questionnaires to digital startups, and ultimately obtains 203 valid samples. The theoretical hypotheses are empirically tested using the PLS-SEM approach, and the findings are robustly tested through multiple regression analysis and multi-cluster analysis.

The results indicate that strategic learning can promote digital startup opportunity iteration by enhancing organizational agility (entrepreneurial agility and adaptive agility); and the positive effect of entrepreneurial agility on digital startup opportunity iteration increases as technological turbulence increases, while the positive effect of adaptive agility on digital startup opportunity iteration does not change significantly. Therefore, this paper validates the mediating role of organizational agility and the moderating role of technological turbulence, clarifies the impact mechanism of strategic learning on digital startup opportunity iteration, enriches the research in the field of strategic learning as well as entrepreneurial opportunity iteration, and expands the application scope of the social construct theory.

The main contributions of this paper are that: First, it focuses on the strategic learning behaviors and organizational agility construction of enterprises, providing a new perspective for the research on the dynamic mechanism of digital startup opportunity iteration. Second, it creatively establishes the theoretical link between strategic learning and opportunity iteration after the establishment of enterprises, and uses organizational agility as a key mediating path to open up the black box of the impact mechanism of strategic learning on opportunity iteration, enriching the research on the mechanism of strategic learning. Third, it analyzes the weighting role of technological turbulence, deepening the understanding on the role boundary of organizational agility in the digital context.