Purpose The study reconstructs the historical evolution of research on dynamic capabilities (DCs), perhaps the most influential framework in contemporary strategic management for explaining how firms achieve and sustain competitive advantage. By examining its development over nearly three decades, the study aims to explain how recurring theoretical and practical challenges shaped the framework’s evolution and growing centrality within strategic-management research. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a Historical Literature Review of 140 articles published between 1997 and 2026 in leading management and organization journals. The analysis combines systematic corpus construction, bibliometric structuring, reflexive thematic analysis and historical periodization to reconstruct the field’s evolution and identify major turning points. Findings DCs research evolved through five historical phases. Each phase emerged from the interaction between shifts in strategic-management...