title: Understanding Digital Innovation Processes and Outcomes
Creators: name: Wyrtki, Katrin
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Digital Innovation
subject: Digital Social Innovation
subject: Opportunity Management
subject: Disruption Evolution
subject: AI Readiness
subject: Taxonomy
subject: 330
subject: 600
subject: 650

description: Digital technologies fundamentally drive socio-technical change for individuals and society as well as for organisations and the economy. With their unique characteristics, digital technologies change the nature of innovation and facilitate digital innovation. Digital innovation has transformative effects on products, services, processes, and business models, and enables organisations to reach new market opportunities, increase their efficiency, and contribute to a better society. Thus, digital innovation opens opportunities for organisations but also poses disruptive threats. Academics and practitioners agree that organisations need to capitalise on opportunities, anticipate disruptive threats, and develop digital innovation to maintain a competitive advantage and thrive in the digital economy. However, many organisations struggle in the different stages of the digital innovation process. Although research into digital innovation has matured considerably, it still lacks guidance on understanding and managing digital innovation processes and outcomes. Against this background, this cumulative doctoral thesis comprises six research articles that examine the processes and outcomes of digital innovation. Taking different conceptual lenses as well as applying qualitative and quantitative research designs, this thesis provides frameworks and methods that guide organisations in initiating and developing digital innovation and that structure digital social innovation as a specific innovation outcome type. The insights are relevant for academics and practitioners as they provide both a scientific perspective and practical guidance. Concerning the initiation of digital innovation, research article #1 presents an opportunity-led ideation method that systematically guides organisations to capitalise on opportunities in the initiation stage of the digital innovation process. Incorporating different opportunity sources, the method reduces the uncertainty that organisations experience during the unstructured initiation stage. Complementing the opportunity-led perspective, research article #2 conceptualises the evolution of disruptive threats and provides a method that helps organisations to identify and assess disruptive threats. This thesis goes on to provide descriptive and prescriptive insights into developing innovation in challenging organisational contexts. Some organisations face barriers that impede innovation, for instance, limited qualified personnel, limited financial resources, or a lack of capabilities. These barriers increase organisations’ need to complement their set of resources and capabilities. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), for instance, cooperation is a way to complement resources as well as share the costs and risks of innovating with external partners. Research article #3 presents a taxonomy that structures characteristics of cooperation setups to foster SMEs’ innovativeness and provides guidance on why, with whom, and how to cooperate. Since the taxonomy revealed a lack of actionable practices that support organisations in developing digital innovation, additional frameworks are presented. Research article #4 investigates the development of citizen-centric digital public services and presents success factors and a blueprint to guide this approach in the public sector. Research has revealed that developing digital innovation requires an environment that is conducive for digital innovation. Thus, organisations must assess whether their internal organisational environment is ready for digital innovation adoption and whether and how they should adapt it. Focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) as a digital technology, research article #5 conceptualises AI readiness factors for AI adoption. The findings emphasise that AI readiness is an integral part of organisations’ decisions across the entire AI adoption process to guide AI-related investments, prioritisation, and resource allocation. The thesis concludes by investigating an emerging digital innovation outcome type, digital social innovation, which enables organisations to reach new markets, new customers, and new sources of profit by combining social and economic value creation. Connecting the research into digital innovation with the research into social innovation, research article #6 proposes a conceptualisation of digital social innovation, summarising relevant characteristics and combinations that commonly co-occur in industry. Overall, this thesis contributes to the research into digital innovation processes and outcomes, applying qualitative and quantitative research methods, i.e. action design research, design science research, taxonomies, explorative case study research, and a qualitative interview study. Further, this thesis builds on and extends relevant research streams into digital innovation initiation and development processes, as well as digital innovation outcomes.