Managing Digitally Enabled Innovation: A Conceptual Framework

Innovation is becoming a major driving force for economic and social development. At European Union (EU) level, it is appointed as one of the major pillars of the growth strategy till 2020. The increasing world-wide digitalization is emphasizing the relevance of digital technologies and the ways how firms can leverage their business results by digitally enabled innovation adoption. In the new digital age business models are increasingly gaining importance as determinants of firm's competitiveness and sustainability. The adoption of innovation brings challenges and opportunities for firms, but also specific needs related to the way for consolidating a digital business strategy and assure positive impacts. The management of digitally enabled innovation thus appears a challenging area of research. Based on scientific literature from the fields of innovation, IT and management, we identified several contributions for this debate and developed a conceptual framework to help to identify the way how firms conduct their digital strategies. Our conceptual framework, that can be used as a basis for future applications, emerges from the digitally enabled innovation and digital business strategy concepts and points three dimensions of analysis: i) Innovation dimension, ii) Technological dimension, and iii) Strategy dimension. Our study builds upon established concepts related to the adoption of innovation enabled by Information Technologies (IT) and adds recent perspectives stemming from the present digital transformation, its impacts, and value generation. We propose an extensive conceptual framework with ten categories and a set of factors that can motivate future studies that wish to identify how firms conduct innovation processes. Through our work we lay grounds for quantitative and qualitative studies to verify the relevance of the several factors in different firm realities. We intend to go further in that sense, drawing a list of questions to be used in a future qualitative research to support the characterization of firms' behaviour in relation to the strategic decisions behind digitally enabled innovation.