Beginning with Schumpeter’s influential works in the 1930s, innovation depicts one of the major challenges for organizations and is seen as a critical element how organizations can achieve and sustain competitive advantage (Grant 1996; McGrath et al. 1995; Schumpeter 1934; Teece 2010). Following the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), organizations need to develop superior innovation capabilities in order to realize superior innovation performance (Calantone et al. 2002; Grant 1996; Slater et al. 2014). Accordingly, the concept of innovation capabilities has been thoroughly theorized and empirically investigated over the last decades (Terziovski 2010). 

 

In general, innovation capabilities can be understood as an organization’s ability to transform resources, knowledge, and ideas into new organizational solutions that fundamentally differ from already existing ones (Damanpour 1991; Joshi et al. 2010; Lawson and Samson 2001). This idea is also true in the era of digital transformation and manifests, for instance, in the fundamental role of digital innovations in digital strategies (Barrett et al. 2015; Bharadwaj et al. 2013) and the ongoing academic discussion on digital innovation management (Kohli and Melville 2018; Nambisan et al. 2017). However, with the advent of digital technologies the rules for innovation changed dramatically and calls for dedicated theories on digital innovations started to emerge (Nambisan et al. 2017). Hence, researchers have begun to investigate the capabilities that underlie digital innovations. For instance, Tai et al. (2017) conceptualize DIC as an organization’s ability to conduct innovative IS activities along three dimensions: functional IS, business technology, and business administration. Dong and Wu (2015) argue that an organization’s ability to strategically use social media technologies leads to digitally enabled innovation capabilities. Moreover, according to Nwankpa and Datta (2017), an organization’s ability to invest in innovative emerging technologies influences its ability to pursue digital innovations. In addition, the ability to create and manage digital platforms (Karimi and Walter 2015), to assimilate and diffuse innovations (Roberts et al. 2016), to attract and train digital talents (Wang et al. 2013), or to manage innovation ecosystems (Kim et al. 2017) has been associated positively with digital innovations. 

 

IT capabilities depict another important determinant of innovation success in general and digital innovation success in particular (Bharadwaj 2000; Kohli and Melville 2018; Chan and Ahuja 2015; Wiesböck 2018; Mauerhoefer et al. 2017). To begin with, organizations need to be able to manage digital infrastructures. Furthermore, organizations need to be able to create and run digital solutions – which, among others, involves superior IT planning, IT management, or IT implementation skills – and have to be able to align their IT and business organizations. Moreover, organizations need to be able to realize the necessary conditions that facilitate digital innovations in the form of specific structures, resources, culture, or governance mechanisms. And finally, organizations need to be able to create and run digital business concepts that complement digital solutions. 

 

On a more general level, recent studies have pointed out the idiosyncrasies of digital innovations (Nambisan et al. 2017; Yoo et al. 2012) and argued for dedicated digital capability concepts (Levallet and Chan 2018; Tumbas et al. 2017a; Freitas Junior et al. 2016). Accordingly, digital innovations require dedicated capabilities that deliberately address the tasks and activities related to the development and management of digital innovations (Wiesböck 2018). Such capabilities refer to an organization’s ability to create novel digital products and services, organizational processes and structures, or business models through the innovative use of digital technologies (Nambisan et al. 2017; Wiesböck 2018). 

 

 

Sumber: 

Wiesböck, F., & Hess, T. (2018). Understanding the capabilities for digital innovations from a digital technology perspective (No. 1/2018). Arbeitsbericht. 

 Nambisan, S. 2017. “Digital Entrepreneurship: Toward a Digital Technology Perspective of Entrepreneurship.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(6), 1029-1055. 

 Nambisan, S./Lyytinen, K./Majchrzak, A./Song, M. 2017. “Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research in a Digital World.” MIS Quarterly, 41(1), 223-238. 

 Kohli, R./Melville, N. P. 2018. “Digital Innovation: A Review and Synthesis.” Information Systems Journal, 28(1), 1-24.