Digital innovation management ecosystem: managing digital innovation for improved competitiveness and continued sustainability

Abstract

To gain competitive advantage for continued sustainability at the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, established firms need to develop digital ambidexterity in order to exploit their current cash cows; while simultaneously exploring new opportunities that come with digital technologies. Despite the current literature in digital innovation being substantial, digital innovation management literature remains fragmented and incomplete. Therefore, this study explored the digital innovation management in the established and middle to large sized organisations, with the intention of developing a comprehensive Digital Innovation Management Ecosystem, aimed at helping these firms build capability for digital ambidexterity; to ensure success of their digital innovation initiatives for improved competitiveness and longer term sustainability. This was achieved through integration of two frameworks and addition of two extra concepts from the third framework, identified from the literature review. The resulting ecosystem model comprised a total of eight building blocks namely Digital Strategy, Responsive Leadership, Innovation Culture, Capabilities, Employee Connectedness, Digital Evolution Scanning, Value Proposition and Customer Experience. The newly developed Digital Innovation Management Ecosystem was then validated deductively through 13 semi-structured and audio recorded interviews with a heterogeneous sample, comprising Heads of IT or Digital or Transformation divisions, from 6 service industries, based in three countries. The 12 interviews were conducted face-to-face while one was conducted via the internet. The data was thematically and deductively analysed in Atlas.ti. Therefore, the study contributed to the growing literature by formulating the comprehensive Digital Innovation Management Ecosystem and empirically by guiding the firms in their digital innovation endeavours.