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While the body of research on grand challenges (GCs) has grown, our understanding of the role of corporate social innovation (CSI) in tackling exigent GCs, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, is limited. Based on in‐depth analyses of four cases of CSI in the services sector during the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper contributes to the GC literature by developing a 3Es framework of the CSI process (i.e., embeddedness, engagement, and enhancement) to illustrate the mechanisms through which exigent GCs can be effectively addressed by firms in the services sector. First, CSI embeddedness in intersectoral partnerships with international organizations based on deep‐rooted trust and collective commitment is found to be a fundamental mechanism for efficiently addressing the COVID‐19 crisis. Second, CSI engagement through the transformation of existing technology and/or the adaption of existing products/services is found to be an important mechanism for meeting pandemic‐induced social needs. Specifically, it is found that leading‐edge technologies such as digital platforms can be rapidly repurposed to enable loosely coupled systems that evolve as a new channel to bring together various stakeholders and thus address this urgent GC. Finally, CSI enhancement supported by managerial agility and participatory governance structure plays a crucial role in enabling CSI to function effectively in the context of exigent GCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and organizational scholars have paid increasing attention to the interconnections between digital transformation and innovation management in the last decade. However, a highly fragmented understanding of this topic is what we are left with so far. In this editorial, we suggest an approach to open up the black box of the interplay between digital transformation and innovation management by providing a framework that identifies three levels of analyisis (i.e., macro, meso, and micro) along which existing and future research on the topic can be organized. This model encourages scholars to conduct theoretical and empirical studies on how digital transformation affects ecosystems' structure and governance, how industries and firms compete and organize for innovation in a digitalized world, how the processes for developing new products and services change under the effect of digital technologies, and the implications of digital transformation on managing people and teams involved in the innovation process, among the other topics. We also provide a synthesis of the eight papers published in the Special Issue that this editorial introduces and develop an agenda for future research that will hopefully contribute to encourage and shape future scholarly efforts into this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Search and recombination are important mechanisms in the creativity phase of innovation. Digital transformation and the resulting pervasive digitalization of the innovation function have often been associated with increasing possibilities for search and recombination. In this paper, by systematically integrating the search and recombination literature with the literature on digitalization, we demonstrate that digitalization may engender new idiosyncratic tensions in the organizational antecedents of search and recombination and, by implication, in their likely outcomes. We propose that, depending on the interactions among the idiosyncratic tensions identified herein, knowledge recombination might spur very different outcomes, including knowledge layering, knowledge integration, knowledge grafting, or even no recombination at all (which we label "search for the sake of search"). These outcomes may not always be the initially planned desired outcomes. Finally, we provide implications of our integrative framework pertaining to product development and to organizing for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of any innovation process lies a fundamental practice: the way people create ideas and solve problems. This "decision making" side of innovation is what scholars and practitioners refer to as "design." Decisions in innovation processes have so far been taken by humans. What happens when they can be substituted by machines? Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings data and algorithms to the core of the innovation processes. What are the implications of this diffusion of AI for our understanding of design and innovation? Is AI just another digital technology that, akin to many others, will not significantly question what we know about design? Or will it create transformations in design that current theoretical frameworks cannot capture? This paper proposes a framework for understanding the design and innovation in the age of AI. We discuss the implications for design and innovation theory. Specifically, we observe that, as creative problem‐solving is significantly conducted by algorithms, human design increasingly becomes an activity of sensemaking, that is, understanding which problems should or could be addressed. This shift in focus calls for the new theories and brings design closer to leadership, which is, inherently, an activity of sensemaking. Our insights are derived from and illustrated with two cases at the frontier of AI—Netflix and Airbnb (complemented with analyses of Microsoft and Tesla)—which point to two directions for the evolution of design and innovation in firms. First, AI enables an organization to overcome many past limitations of human‐intensive design processes, by improving the scalability of the process, broadening its scope across traditional boundaries, and enhancing its ability to learn and adapt on the fly. Second, and maybe more surprising, while removing these limitations, AI also appears to deeply enact several popular design principles. AI thus reinforces the principles of Design Thinking, namely: being people‐centered, abductive, and iterative. In fact, AI enables the creation of solutions that are more highly user centered than human‐based approaches (i.e., to an extreme level of granularity, designed for every single person); that are potentially more creative; and that are continuously updated through learning iterations across the entire product life cycle. In sum, while AI does not undermine the basic principles of design, it profoundly changes the practice of design. Problem‐solving tasks, traditionally carried out by designers, are now automated into learning loops that operate without limitations of volume and speed. The algorithms embedded in these loops think in a radically different way than a designer who handles the complex problems holistically with a systemic perspective. Algorithms instead handle complexity through very simple tasks, which are iterated continuously. This paper discusses the implications of these insights for design and innovation management scholars and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the changing way people live, communicate, and work, enterprises are striving to shift their existing business model into a "self‐tuning" one. Enterprises are becoming more agile, adaptive, and ambidextrous in order to boost innovation in the current digital transformation era. Nowadays, "digital innovation" is closely associated with Industry 4.0 enablers and smart enterprises. Prior research has shown that while multinational enterprises—across many sectors—have already embraced the aforementioned advancements, their adoption by small and‐medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) has so far taken place mainly in the manufacturing sector. Thus, based on a sample of 280 self‐tuned smart manufacturing SMEs and having utilized the structural equation modeling (SEM), this study was aimed to investigate how digital innovation is influenced by the three pillars of self‐tuning models—agility, adaptation, and ambidexterity. Our paper has focussed on the digital systems in which SMEs, spurred by networking and open innovation solutions, operate and innovate in response to external triggers, displaying a balance between exploration and exploitation, and a strong agile capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation in a digital world increasingly revolves around open platforms that consist of a core technology and a large variety of complementary products developed by an ecosystem of independent complementors. The platform ecosystem literature has mainly focused on indirect network effects arising from the quantity of complements, with little attention to the quality of complements, despite the importance of quality for the complementary value that drives platform ecosystems. Because digital products are malleable and dependent on the ever‐evolving ecosystem, we advance a relational and dynamic conceptualization of complement quality. Drawing on a systematic, in‐depth qualitative case study of the Philips Hue connected lighting platform and its complementary third‐party apps, we study how and why complement quality is sustained over time. By analyzing apps and their updates, we developed a process model that explains pathways through which complement quality is enhanced, maintained, or deteriorates. Changes in the platform core, changes in other ecosystem elements, and idiosyncratic connections by users result in expanding affordances, materializing glitches, and emerging obsolescence. Without further action, glitches and obsolescence lead to deteriorating quality. Joint action of complementors, platform owners, and users is needed to act upon affordances, glitches, and obsolescence, in order to maintain integrity and enhance functionality. This paper contributes to the literature on innovation in platform ecosystems by explaining the dynamic and relational nature of complement quality in a digital platform ecosystem and showing the interdependence of ecosystem members (the triad between platform owner, complementors, and users) in sustained development efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many managers expect a substantial impact of digitization on new product development (NPD) as it is an information-intensive business process. Therefore, a better understanding of how information technology (IT) might improve the NPD process is important for both theory and practice. Drawing on the IT business value literature, this study develops a comprehensive conceptual model to investigate empirically how IT and non-IT organizational antecedents translate into NPD IT capabilities and competences and how these are related with NPD performance. Based on survey data from German NPD managers, this study offers several insights. First, it shows that the development of superior NPD IT capabilities and competences depends on the ability to acquire and deploy suitable IT (i.e., firm-level IT capabilities) and on appropriate strategic, structural, and cultural conditions ensured by a strong top management focus on NPD IT (i.e., executive champion for NPD IT). This study hence contributes empirical evidence to the NPD and the IT business value literature by expanding research on complementary resources. Second, this study addresses limitations regarding the conceptualization of NPD IT capabilities and their relationship with further sources of competitive advantage arising from NPD IT tool usage by considering both the effectiveness and the frequency of usage as well as the relationship between both. Third, this research updates the measurement of NPD IT tool usage effectiveness (i.e., IT leveraging competence) to account for technological developments. Moreover, this study reveals that the effectiveness of NPD IT tool usage is positively associated with NPD performance. It also highlights that the dissemination of IT tools does not directly increase NPD performance, but that NPD IT tool use frequency is an important antecedent of IT leveraging competence. For managers, this paper offers empirical evidence that firm-wide IT capabilities and a focus on NPD IT are important predictors of NPD performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New product development (NPD) success depends on the capacity of different functions to effectively collaborate. In particular, while recent studies have highlighted the importance of marketing and design working together, research suggests this relationship is often fraught with conflict due to different 'thought worlds.' However, empirical research also identifies that the solution lies not in reducing the psychological distance between the two functions, but in the sensemaking practices used by designers and marketers to expand each other's understanding of the potential NPD solution. This process is known as resourceful sensemaking, and it refers to practitioners' capacity to transform knowledge with the aim of expanding each other's horizons to ensure better team outcomes. Drawing on 71 interviews with designers and marketers in Australia and New Zealand, we examine how each function strategically deploys knowledge of the other to improve NPD outcomes. Building on the sensemaking literature, we demonstrate that while still drawing on different thought worlds, the inputs of both designers and marketers are necessary for effective NPD. We also identify that both are capable of creating a common framework of meaning through three resourceful sensemaking practices: exposing, co-opting, and repurposing. Moreover, we identify the need for resourceful sensemaking that results in horizon-expanding discourse among those involved in NPD. These practices are found to enable marketers and designers to expand the range of considerations and inputs into NPD; help organizations reconcile either/or dualisms; and lead them to identify unmet consumer needs, which result in the creation of innovative products. This paper thereby advances understanding of interfunctional coordination in NPD, integration of design into NPD, and sensemaking more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of firms are seeking to leverage emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing, to enhance their innovation efforts. These seemingly distinct technologies are currently coalescing into an encompassing new technology called the digital twin. This technology allows innovative firms to create a digital replica of a physical entity that evolves over its life cycle. This article explores the implications of the digital twin for innovation theory and practice. First, we examine the connection between the digital twin and three related technologies (i.e., 3D printing, big data, and AI). Second, we create a typology of four categories of digital twins (i.e., monitoring, making, enhancing, and replicating) and illustrate their relevance for innovation management. Third, we offer a set of four case studies that exemplify this typology and illustrate how digital twins have been put into practice. Fourth, we craft a set of digital twin‐related future research directions that encompasses a broad range of innovation‐related topics, including service innovation, co‐creation, and product design. We hope that our examination of the digital twin serves as a catalyst to help advance innovation thought and practice in this intriguing new domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation experts posit that digital technologies—such as additive manufacturing (AM)—can address societal challenges and change the nature of work and collaboration. In recognition, this special issue encourages researchers to investigate how AM can be leveraged to reduce environmental externalities and devote greater attention to the production of 3D printed items. This article integrates academic research on new product development and the cradle‐to‐cradle philosophy with insights gleaned from long‐term case observations across a series of large‐scale AM projects to advance that 3D printing can unleash three pivotal adaptations to the traditional conception‐development‐launch ecosystem. Specifically, our direct participation in designing and building multiple 3D printed products reveals that: (1) spent products can possess valuable ingredient materials that can be repurposed, (2) the reduced structural strength of the reclaimed material can be a positive force insofar as spawning innovation in a new product category, and (3) manufacturing should appear as an independent stage in new product development. On this last point, our completed projects align with recent observations that newer AM technologies can make prototyping and manufacturing products easier, faster, and less expensive. Accordingly, we advance a cyclical sustainable innovation process, which consists of ideation, development, AM output (i.e., manufacturing), and material reclamation. This research is both theoretically meaningful and pragmatically useful. It addresses knowledge gaps regarding AM in the academic literature and spawns new research questions for innovation scholars. For managers, it provides a path to supplant the wasteful take‐make‐dispose production model with the more efficient and effective take‐make‐transmigrate approach that we deem an innovation loop. Specifically, our final built project—a 3D designed and printed chair that uses polymers from the spent chassis of a 3D printed car—serves as a proof of concept that AM can be a catalyst to a paradigmatic shift in how products are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital manufacturing technologies offer many opportunities for established companies to innovate. They promote data‐driven gains in operational efficiency and enable the transformation of current business models or the creation of entirely new differentiation opportunities. However, many digital innovation projects in manufacturing fall short of their initial ambitions and result in incremental improvements to an existing manufacturing system, if at all. To understand the reasons for the discrepancy between initial ambitions and achieved outcomes, we conduct a longitudinal qualitative study based on a collaborative research project with eight companies and additional expert interviews. Applying a paradox lens, we identify three tensional knots that reveal interrelated, multiple tensions of digital innovation management projects in established manufacturing firms: (1) amalgamating physical and digital assets, (2) innovating in an existing modus operandi, and (3) integrating internal and external stakeholders. These tensions result in the simultaneous occurrence of dynamic and conflicting forces that turn digital innovation projects in manufacturing away from their high initial ambitions. Our findings explain why digitizing the manufacturing system is a non‐trivial endeavor for established firms, which need to balance the complexities inherent in digitization efforts and manage conflicting goals. For managers, the findings provide ways to manage the interrelated tensions in their digital innovation efforts, enabling them to better capitalize on disruptive innovation ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kahn's (2022) essay notes the growth in centers for innovation and entrepreneurship on college campuses and prompted his call for a clearer understanding and appreciation of the roles of the two phenomena. Kahn argues that while entrepreneurship focuses on new "venture" creation, innovation focuses on "offering" creation, i.e., creating new products, services, marketing methods, etc. His essay stimulated us to reflect on how the study and practice of innovation management have evolved and developed, especially in the marketing discipline. In large part, recent interest in entrepreneurship and innovation has been fueled by digital technologies (DT). These technologies have enabled entrepreneurial start‐ups as well as elevated the prominence of innovative marketing practices as a source of competitive advantage. Despite their relevance for innovations in marketing strategy formulation and execution, research on DT‐enabled marketing innovation is limited and fragmented. Against this background, this article describes the Snyder Innovation Management Center at Syracuse University's emphasis on the academic study of innovation management in a marketing context. The Center's areas of focus offer a useful starting point for a sharpened yet broader focus concerning to the study of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The redesign of traditional products into innovative digital products is a profound form of digital innovation. It is imperative for both digitally native and traditional firms to understand and effectively manage this form of digital innovation to survive and thrive amid expected disruptions when traditional products are driven out of business by digital products. Current insights into this form of digital innovation are limited, as previous research has focused on the design of innovative digital technologies. However, if we break everyday digital products down, we often find centuries‐old physical products and digital technologies that have existed for years, if not decades. Therefore, a more comprehensive understanding of digital innovation is needed to attend to how the digital and the physical are combined, and how such a combination makes digital products innovative even when it reuses existing digital technologies. To this end, this study addresses the research question, "How does the reuse of digital technologies enable the redesign of a traditional product into an innovative digital product?" Adopting the "design thinking as reframing" perspective, we conducted a grounded theory study of the design thinking acted out by the doing of the design of an innovative digital theatre. This study inductively develops a theory explaining the design thinking of redesigning a traditional product into an innovative digital product as a digital reframing process, where designers take the frames of digital technologies and rethink existing products (frame taking), merge the frames into the product under design (frame merging), and propose a new frame to interpret the resultant product (frame giving). Our study has important implications for both research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this first issue of 2021, we are pleased to offer I Journal of Product Innovation Management i ( I JPIM i ) readers the latest scholarly insights on the topic of "Digital Transformation and Innovation Management". To all of our readers, authors, reviewers, editorial review board members, associate editors and other contributors, we wish a healthy and productive 2021. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines the impact of family management on digital transformation with specific regard to the firm's development of Internet of Things (IoT) innovations. Drawing on the distinctive characteristics of firms with family managers, such as the focus on family‐centered noneconomic goals, long tenure, emotional ties to existing assets, and rigid mental models, it hypothesizes that increasing family involvement in the top management team is negatively related to the development of IoT innovations that are distant from a firm's existing technology base (i.e., exploratory IoT innovations) compared to exploitative IoT innovations. Further, the study proposes that the firm's degree of technological diversification, especially in unrelated forms, reinforces this relationship. The longitudinal analysis between 2002 and 2013 on a sample of publicly traded German firms allows us to test our hypotheses from the beginning of the emergence of the IoT concept. Our findings show that due to the particular characteristics of their managers, family‐managed firms do not welcome the risks related to exploratory IoT innovations, and the benefit of risk diversification from technological diversification is lower than the cost of abandoning family‐centered goals. As our results imply that the involvement of family managers constrains the development of exploratory IoT innovation, the top management team composition in firms that intend to be at the forefront of the digital transformation should be accurately designed by avoiding a high proportion of family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing scholarly attention on digital transformation, there are only limited micro‐level insights into how incumbent firms organize and manage their digital transformation efforts on a daily basis. Through a longitudinal, exploratory qualitative case study of a large firm, this article investigates how organizational members respond to an ambidextrous organizing model designed to accelerate digital innovations. The firm relied on a hybrid model of separation and integration to organize and manage its digital transformation efforts. This study unfolds the implications and consequences of such a model at the micro‐level. By applying a paradox lens, it shows how the coping actions of organizational members affected the digital transformation. The article illustrates how the hybrid organizing model led to the emergence of three paradoxes at the organizational level (paradoxes of organizing, attention, and knowledge sharing) that organizational members had to cope with. It shows how organizational members, through their coping with these paradoxes, indirectly affected the organizing model by altering its original design; and how the management, influenced by these learnings, subsequently adapted the model to enable a better sustainability over time. Overall, the findings show and explain why organizing for digital transformation is a particularly complex and paradoxical endeavor. They also provide important insights to managers and organizational developers, helping them to become aware of possible tensions in their organizing efforts as well as of coping strategies and practices to tackle these tensions. Finally, the article suggests different paths for further research in digital transformation and digital innovation from a micro‐level perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of platform‐based businesses in the modern economy is growing continuously and becoming increasingly relevant. Specifically, the deployment of digital technologies has enhanced the applicability of two‐sided business models, enabling companies to act not just as builders and owners of assets, but also as orchestrators of external resources. Management research has, therefore, focused increasingly on the unique aspects of this model. At the center of a two‐sided platform there is a platform provider that enables a transaction between the sides, reducing the relative transaction costs. However, in recent years, a new technology emerged that challenges some of the underlying assumptions of this model: the blockchain. Blockchain enables the creation of a peer‐to‐peer network that is able to authenticate transactions, upon which applications and services may be built. It allows users to conduct transactions without the need for a central platform. We explore how blockchain technology reshapes two‐sided platforms, focusing in particular on the role of the platform provider. The research is based upon multiple case studies, using an inductive approach to explore this emerging phenomenon. Our findings show there is a significant shift in the role of the central player that links the two sides of a transaction using blockchain. We frame this as a shift from a "platform provider" to a "service provider," leveraging the blockchain as a Platform‐as‐a‐Service. Our work examines the peculiarities of this model, unveiling new dynamics in these businesses. Specifically, we show that different variables must be considered to classify two‐sided platforms using blockchain. Furthermore, the essential characteristics of two‐sided platforms must also be enlarged. For example, traditional platform theories emphasize the importance of cross‐side network externalities in creating value. In blockchain‐enabled platforms however, we show the use of "tokens" play a key role in creating different types of externalities between the two sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how intermediaries, in general, and those with digital service platforms specifically, engage with clients to help them innovate their services within their service ecosystem. Based on an embedded, longitudinal case study, the results reveal the cumulative development and deployment of technological, marketing, and co‐creation capabilities by intermediaries, and how these capabilities allow intermediaries to engage with clients, so as to enable clients’ open service innovation despite their internal challenges. In turn, this article extends theory on service innovation by clarifying the role and function of intermediaries in service ecosystems in enabling clients to leverage open service innovation. Second, this study contributes to resource‐based scholarship by clarifying how these three sets of capabilities and their micro‐foundations relate to each other. Despite the obvious importance of technological capabilities, online intermediaries are more than just “virtual” service platform providers. The intermediary’s technological and marketing capabilities assist clients in dealing with project‐related and organizational challenges to open service innovation. Acting as a higher‐order capability, co‐creation capabilities—through shaping marketing and technological capabilities over time and also through conditioning their deployment—improve the proficiency of these capabilities. The findings advance insights on the agential role of the intermediary’s co‐creation capabilities, purposefully developed and deployed to foster client engagement, and thus support service organizations in leveraging open service innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]