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Introduction
Within the past decade, digital technologies have dramatically transformed the way of doing business (Gray et al., 2013). Companies are transforming themselves digitally not only as a way to re-think what their customers like (Filieri et al., 2018; Galati and Galati, 2019), but also to create operating models that can take full advantage of what is newly possible, and so differentiate themselves from their competition (Berman, 2012). In this landscape, innovation remains crucial to the development of society, to business growth and for maintaining a competitive advantage within markets (Franklin et al., 2013). On top of this, the innovation process is still an iterative, uncertain, interactive, path-dependent, context-specific and multi-tasking undertaking (Hüsig and Kohn, 2009; Pinna et al., 2018). It, therefore, remains the case that a key topic in business is to identify the right solutions for implementing a process of innovation, from the initial phase of ideation to market diffusion (Brem et al., 2016; Ganzaroli et al., 2016; Rekonen and Björklund, 2016).
The topic of digitalizing the innovation process is gaining momentum in scientific literature (Brem and Viardot, 2017). As various scholars have pointed out, the exponential growth of digital technologies has resulted in significant improvements to many business processes (e.g. Yoo et al., 2012; Levine and Prietula, 2013; Galati and Bigliardi, 2019a), and has also played a significant role in the field of innovation (e.g. Holmström and Partanen, 2014; Hylving, 2015).
Within this context, the term “digital innovation” has been conceptualized as “the creation of (and consequent change in) market offerings, business processes, or models that result from the use of digital technologies” and, consequently, “digital innovation management” refers to the “practices, processes, and principles that underlie the effective orchestration of digital innovation” (Nambisan et al., 2017, p. 224). The need to move forward in the theory on digital innovation management was stressed in a recent special issue on this topic, in connection with the research stream of information systems (Nambisan et al., 2017). It was also emphasized that, without interdisciplinary effort and research by scholars in other disciplines (Nambisan et al., 2017) or addressing competing concerns (Svahn et al., 2017), it is unlikely that valuable theoretical advancements can be achieved.