Taking the Digital Innovation Journey beyond Technology: A Human-Centered Design Approach

Abstract

The digital innovation era creates new company challenges and amplifies the gap between leaders and followers. This paper builds on a human-centered design (HCD) approach, arguing that companies can bridge this gap by mastering the human aspects of their digital journey. The research goal is to explore a practitioner-derived perspective on how their companies have approached digital innovation through the lens of human-centered design, i.e., putting humans at the center and looking at the more 'human' aspects of digital technologies. A study was conducted online with professional managers' views from the field of digital innovation. The findings were clustered using the Digital Transformation Framework. This approach allowed the development of four propositions that can be verified in future studies into how companies can use HCD approaches to engage customers and employees better and navigate the digital innovation journey.