to explain digital technology's impact on the innovation process

What is it about?

Malleability, homogeneity, and transferability are three distinct characteristics of digital technology that allow the continuous evolvement of innovation and the generation of new forms of agency, both within and across processes. Scholars have developed various research directions to theoretically understand digital technology correlative to business process management. Yet, literature in this area lacks a structured view of how digital technologies modify the innovation processes, and research aimed at examining the effect of digital technology on business process management is still relatively scant and in a very early stage. This chapter sheds light on scholarly works to explain digital technology's impact on the innovation process and how it is linked to business process management.

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Why is it important?

The emergence of digital technologies and their constantly expanding digital infrastructures, including social media, wearables, mobile computing, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, data analytics, cloud computing, robotics, machine learning, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are radically modifying the processes, outcomes, and nature of innovation (Nambisan, Lyytinen, & Yoo, 2020). Digital innovation can generally be described as “the creation of (and consequent change in) market offerings, business processes, or models that result from the use of digital technology” (Nambisan, Lyytinen, Majchrzak, & Song, 2017, p. 224). Digital innovation consists of a “new combination of digital and physical components” (Yoo, Henfridsson, & Lyytinen, 2010, p. 725) that are carried by an amorphous agency to achieve uncertain outcomes resulting from a constant flow of integrating, expanding, and augmenting digital tools and components into business infrastructure (Nambisan et al., 2020).