Towards an Intra- and Interorganizational Perspective: Objectives and Areas of Activity of Digital Innovation Units

Abstract

Incumbent firms increasingly strive to embrace digital innovation, often via implementing dedicated digital innovation units (DIUs). As seizing the rapid and various digital innovation-related market movements may be overwhelming for an individual DIU, collaborations within ecosystems are perceived as crucial for continuously recognizing business opportunities and threats. Although this is a growing field of interest in recent research, insights into the objectives of DIUs and the consequent activities for effectively handling digital innovation are yet scarce. We address this issue by synthesizing 28 cases on DIUs through a qualitative meta-analysis. The analysis revealed that while DIUs enforce an intraorganizational cultural and overarching organizational design change, they also impose an interorganizational perspective with customer-oriented digital expertise and innovation, as well as cultivation of digital innovation ecosystems. Thus, we contribute to the existing DIU research by clarifying these objectives and extending them to achieve a conscious interorganizational perspective with accompanying activities.