title: The Interplay of Digital Innovation and Cybersecurity from a Consumer and Organizational Perspective
Creators: name: Heierhoff, Sebastian
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2025

description: The rapidly evolving technological landscape does, in the form of digital innovations, create opportunities for organizations and consumers alike. At the same time, it does, however, confront both parties with increasing cybersecurity challenges. This dissertation deals with the conflicting demands of maintaining competitive advantage and leveraging the benefits of digital innovation while ensuring cybersecurity. It explores the resulting tensions and potential trade-offs from both a consumer and organizational perspective, seeking to provide theoretical and practical contributions on how the interplay between digital innovation and cybersecurity can be optimized and how the two domains can be balanced effectively.
Thereby, the dissertation is guided by three overarching research questions: First, how do consumers' attitudes towards innovation and cybersecurity influence their acceptance of digital innovations? Second, how do organizations perceive and navigate the trade-offs between digital innovation and cybersecurity? Third, what are the implications of organizational design in general and organizational ambidexterity in specific for the interplay of digital innovation and cybersecurity capabilities? These research questions are dealt with in four empirical studies.
The first study focuses on the consumer perspective and the trade-offs they make in their technology acceptance decisions. Therefore, the Technology Acceptance Model is extended by four constructs - Personal innovation affinity, personal risk appetite, perceived innovativeness, and perceived cybersecurity risk. Participants of an online survey are presented with three fictitious products from the mobility sector, where digital innovations such as connected vehicles and smart mobility solutions are emerging rapidly. The findings from the first study underline that consumers sometimes neglect cybersecurity when innovative product characteristics promise substantial benefits. For certain product types, consumers do, however, seem to have increased cybersecurity concerns that organizations need to consider. The study suggests that consumer education and transparency about a product’s cybersecurity maturity are essential for informed technology acceptance decisions.
Studies two, three, and four deal with the organizational perspective of the interplay between digital innovation and cybersecurity.
The second study focuses on the automotive industry, exploring how organizations perceive the conflicting demands and balance them through organizational ambidexterity. The study follows a qualitative research approach drawing on nine experts questioned in semi-structured interviews. Its findings confirm the perception of a trade-off between the two domains in the automotive industry, with factors like the importance of time-to-market for digital innovations leading organizations to deprioritize and postpone cybersecurity aspects. The study suggests that strategic and operational elements of organizational ambidexterity, including corporate culture, management commitment, communication, and early integration of cybersecurity, can help minimize trade-offs and even turn cybersecurity into a competitive advantage.
The third study focuses on the German logistics industry in a comparable research approach using semi-structured interviews with 14 experts for digital innovation and cybersecurity. Their analysis suggests that there are different types of tensions between digital innovation and cybersecurity capabilities negatively influencing innovation efforts in three ways: by slowing down (temporally), requiring more resources (economically), or restricting innovative freedom (functionally). Furthermore, triggers like rapid technological changes and increased market competition as well as resolving factors like flexible governance structures and an early integration of cybersecurity into digital innovation efforts are identified. Awareness of these factors helps organizations achieve a digital innovation-cybersecurity equilibrium.
The fourth and final study included in this dissertation investigates how organizations can achieve ambidexterity and integrate the two domains in the context of digital innovation units. The cross-industry interview study, analyzed following the Grounded Theory methodology, leverages Galbraith’s star model as a frame of reference. Embedded within this frame, different types of innovation units and three organizational design patterns that impact the consideration of cybersecurity within these types of units, are identified. The findings underline that, depending on strategic, structural, and processual aspects, the different types of digital innovation units are more or less likely to ill- or over-consider cybersecurity. Besides the study's theoretical contribution to organizational design literature, this framework has practical implications for the setup of innovation units in practice.
Collectively, the four studies contribute to a deeper understanding of the interplay between digital innovation and cybersecurity. Theoretically, while contributing to technology acceptance, organizational design, and ambidexterity theory in general, this dissertation advances the literature on digital innovation management and cybersecurity in specific by advocating for a more integrated approach that considers the conflicting demands of the two domains. Practically, it provides insights for consumers and organizations trying to navigate the resulting tensions, for example, by promoting consumer awareness or by creating an organizational culture that equally promotes both digital innovation and cybersecurity. The frameworks developed in the four studies provide a foundation for future studies on the digital innovation-security nexus, for example in further industries, and offer practical guidance, for example, concerning product marketing or digital innovations strategy.
In conclusion, this dissertation highlights the importance of considering digital innovation and cybersecurity as complementary instead of opposing forces of an organization’s digital transformation. Organizations should not restrict cybersecurity to being a technical issue but see it as a strategic necessity to be embedded into their digital innovation efforts. In the long run, this will lead to more secure digital innovations, increased consumer trust, and competitive advantages.