What’s new about digital innovation?

Practitioners see digital innovation as vital to their business. Academics are also increasingly paying attention to digital innovation. However, it is often unclear what is meant by digital innovation and how it differs from traditional (IS/IT) innovation. To advance our understanding of digital innovation, this paper identifies different conceptualizations of digital innovation in the IS literature and extracts common themes that can point to what is “new” about digital innovation and what is emerging as research areas for the IS discipline. 

Our research identifies two prominent digital innovation conceptualisations, based on Fichman, Dos Santos, and Zheng (2014) and Yoo, Boland, Lyytinen, and Majchrzak (2012), and presents four prominent digital innovation themes: the nature of digital technologies, digitization, digital business model innovation and digital-enabled generativity. We integrate these themes into a framework that conceptualizes digital innovation as a rippling effect starting with digital technologies and conjecture that digital innovation can become ‘hyperinnovation’ through powerful virtuous cycles.

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