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Abstract: Digital technologies are altering competitive grounds in the different sectors of the economy worldwide. Therefore, the research on digital technologies in business and management literature has observed an increasing trend. However, despite growing research on digital innovations in SMEs, we lack an understanding of SMEs' external knowledge and resources exploration and exploitation to build digital innovations. Therefore, this research synthesizes the literature on SMEs' knowledge and resources exploration and exploitation for developing digital innovations. By conducting a systemic literature review, we identified actors and collaborative mechanisms that help SMEs overcome their resource and technological knowledge limitations. Furthermore, with the help of existing literature, we also explain the exploitation process of externally acquired knowledge and resources into organizational internal digital innovation systems.
Keywords: SMEs; digital innovations; knowledge exploration; knowledge exploitation; external collaborations; resource exploration; dynamic capabilities; technological capabilities.
Introduction
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are economic growth engines, mainly responsible for generating significant-scale employment and contributing significantly to most countries' GDP (Kumar et al., 2022). Their flexible organizational structure and agility characterize SMEs to respond to disruptions in their business environment (Chan et al., 2018). In recent developments, it has been evident that SMEs face additional challenges in configuring ways to implement and utilize digital technologies in their business processes and offerings (Kumar et al., 2022). Digital technologies are changing competing grounds at a breakneck pace (Mahmood et al., 2020), and effective utilization of digital technologies leads organizations to have superior organizational performance and outpace their competitors. Therefore, it is worth discussing mechanisms that support SMEs to overcome their resource limitations and help them to build digital innovations. Digital innovation has been defined as "the creation of (and consequent change in) market offerings, business processes, or models that result from the use of digital technology" (Nambisan et al., 2017). This broader term represents the implementation and utilization of digital technologies (including information communication technologies (ICT), information systems (I.S.), and information technologies (I.T.)) in organizational processes, models, and offerings.
Over the last decade, significant growth has been observed in research on digital innovations (Kumar et al., 2022; Chan et al., 2018; Mahmood et al., 2020; Petruzzelli et al., 2022; Estensoro et al., 2021). Extant research documents that due to their smallness, SMEs rely more on...