Digital Innovation: Exploring Integration and Transition Modes in Scaling Success

Aiming at fostering digital innovation for value creation, incumbent firms have largely adopted dedicated and separated structures for innovation and new business creation. While these structures have been successful in enabling exploration, bringing digital innovations to scale remains a challenge. By employing a qualitative case study of an incumbent bank, with individual projects as the unit of analysis, this study investigates the practices and challenges of transitioning digital innovations developed in separate structures to operationalisation or commercialisation in the core of the organisation, a shift essential for enabling innovations to reach scale. Our key contribution is in presenting a dual business-technology transition-to-scale model defined by the intensity of integration and explaining how innovation managers deviate from this model by adopting coping actions aimed at overcoming innovation and organisational transition challenges. With this, we further highlight the challenges of managing an aligned dual business-technology transition in the context of an incumbent firm undergoing digital transformation.

Keywords: Digital innovation; digital transformation; structural ambidexterity; corporate venturing; case study; transition to scale; integration; transfer.
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