Towards a Conceptual Model of Digital Innovation Success

Abstract

Although digital innovation ('DI') is a popular research field in these days, when it comes to innovation success, it has not yet been properly grounded in theory. Accordingly, there are prob-lems in identifying both generic and context-specific critical success factors (CSF) within the innovation process. Existing literature has focused mainly on the development of dynamic capabilities. We argue that to build digital innovation capabili-ties, an organization must first understand and support the ac-tions of those who are actively developing DI. To uncover spe-cific actions that constitute CSFs within every dimension of the digital innovation process, we follow a multiple case study de-sign with seven companies from different industries. Here, we build upon the 'digital innovation framework' which defines the process of creating DI across four dimensions (initiate, de-velop, implement, exploit). Based on these case studies, we build a conceptual model consisting of digital innovation actions, critical success factors and contingency factors. The proposed model serves as a starting point for future research, which should focus on a detailed quantitative investigation of the cause-effect relationships and the contingency factors to vali-date our propositions