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1. Introduction
In today's digital era, digital technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have overturned the basic assumptions of many innovative theories (Nambisan et al., 2017, 2019; Yoo et al., 2010). For instance, the original innovation theory believes that innovation is centralized and bounded within an organization, whereas innovation through digital technology is decentralized and open to participants. Thus, from the perspective of digital innovation, the focus of innovation has gradually shifted from within the organization to the distributed participants (Yoo et al., 2012; Kornberger, 2016; Nambisan et al., 2019). The concept (distributed innovation), which emphasizes both cross-border cooperation and the participation of individuals, users and communities in innovation activities in a more decentralized manner, is quite different from open innovation, which stresses a situation where an organization cooperates across organizational boundaries for resources for innovation (of products, services, business models, processes, etc.). Based on this, the distributed innovation in digital innovation has aroused widespread concern in practice and academia all over the world. In practice, more and more companies have adopted distributed innovation strategies for digital innovation, such as Lego's “Lego Ideas” and “Design By Me” platforms, Xiaomi's “Xiaomi community” and Dell's “Idea Strom” community. The establishment of these distributed participation platforms or communities has injected new vitality into the digital innovation of enterprises. Scholars believe that the distributed innovation has become an important driver of enterprise digital innovation. Thus, the concept provides a powerful source of creativity for the enterprise's new ideas, new services and new technologies (Kornberger, 2016) by reorganizing and integrating knowledge from both internal (Lahiri, 2010; Choudhury, 2017) and external sources (Walsh et al., 2016; Rashid et al., 2019) of the organization, thereby reducing the company's communication costs and R&D costs (Sawhney and Prandelli, 2000; Lyytinen et al., 2016). Admittedly, it is an important driving factor for corporate digital innovation.
Although distributed innovation and digital innovation have received attention in the extant literature, limitations still remain: first, there is a lack of empirical tests on the relationship between distributed innovation and digital innovation performance. As an important driving factor of digital innovation, distributed innovation plays an important role in current researches (Nambisan et al., 2017). However, the current...