Optimal Scheduling of Digital Product Innovation: a Case Study of Yonyou

As an emerging innovation paradigm in the digital economy era, digital innovation has become an important means for manufacturing firms to build supply chain resilience for sustainable development, but its intrinsic mechanism requires clarification. This research explores the impact of digital innovation (digital organizational innovation and digital product innovation) on supply chain resilience (supply chain readiness, supply chain responsiveness, and supply chain recovery) and sustainable performance via structural equation modeling involving data from 226 Chinese manufacturing firms. The results show that digital organizational innovation can promote digital product innovation. Digital organizational innovation and digital product innovation contribute to supply chain readiness, supply chain responsiveness, and supply chain recovery. Supply chain readiness, supply chain responsiveness, and supply chain recovery enhance sustainable performance. Finally, supply chain resilience mediates the relationship between digital innovation and sustainable performance. These findings reveal the role of digital innovation in improving sustainable performance through supply chain resilience and provide practical guidance for manufacturing companies to better conduct digital innovation to build supply chain resilience and thus realize sustainable development.

New product development increasingly involves the concurrent designing of physical and digital artefacts. Successful product innovation requires integration with digital innovation, which can be difficult. This chapter examines the inherent tensions between product innovation and digital innovation. The authors review the relevant literature and compare digital and product innovation, to identify three arching dimensions: organising logic; market dynamics; and architectural composition. They consider these dimensions as paradoxes which produce the frictions between product innovation and digital innovation. The authors suggest ways to achieve what they call digital product innovation, based on three organisational capabilities that managers must develop to overcome these paradoxes. These organisational capabilities are ability for self-organised exploration, horizontal diversification and open-ended design.

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), inherently vulnerable entities, prompting a pivotal question of how to enhance SMEs’ organizational resilience (OR) to withstand discontinuous crises. Although digital innovation (DI) is widely acknowledged as a critical antecedent to OR, limited studies have analyzed the configurational effects of DI on OR, particularly stage-based analysis. Design/methodology/approach Underpinned by the dynamic capabilities view, this study introduces a multi-stage dynamic capabilities framework for OR. Employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), digital product innovation (DPI), digital services innovation (DSI) and digital process innovation (DCI) are further deconstructed into six dimensions. Furthermore, we utilized fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configuration effects of six DI on OR at different stages, using data from 94 Chinese SMEs. Findings First, OR improvement hinges not on a singular DI but on the interactions among various DIs. Second, multiple equivalent configurations emerge at different stages. Before the crisis, absorptive capability primarily advanced through iterative DPI and predictive DSI. During the crisis, response capability is principally augmented by the iterative DPI, distributed DCI, and integrated DCI. After the crisis, recovery capability is predominantly fortified by the iterative DPI, expanded DPI and experiential DSI. Third, iterative DPI consistently assumes a supportive role in fortifying OR. Originality/value This study contributes to the extant literature on DI and OR, offering practical guidance for SMEs to systematically enhance OR by configuring DI across distinct stages.

Product digital innovations are key drivers for differentiation, revenue growth, and competitiveness within the banking sector. In Kenyan banking sector, since 2013, strategic advancements have led to the adoption of digital platforms for service delivery, significantly affecting the industry landscape. The study aimed to investigate the effect of digital product innovations on financial outcomes and the moderating role of government policies in this relationship guided by Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Using a descriptive study design, data was collected from 315 employees across 39 commercial banks, employing structured questionnaires for primary data and industry reports for secondary data. Statistical analysis, including regression models, was conducted to test the hypothesis that digital product innovations have no significant impact on financial performance. Key findings indicate that product innovations such as mobile banking solutions and e-wallets have led to improved customer satisfaction and market relevance. However, challenges such as leadership and organizational culture, financial constraints, and regulatory compliance were identified as barriers to effective product development. The study concluded that while there is a statistically significant correlation between digital product innovations and financial performance, the variability explained by innovations on return on equity (ROE) is moderate (R² = 42.6%). The research highlights the importance of continuous innovation and strategic alignment to enhance performance. Banks that prioritize customer-centric approaches and agile development processes are more successful in driving digital product uptake. Further, commercial banks can invest in Greentech products, enhance digital literacy on digital wallets and personalized finance management tools, adopt optimal resource allocation and invest in innovation labs with elaborate digital system to increase product survival rates and cuts on costs. It also emphasized the role of government policies as a significant factor influencing the financial outcomes of banks, suggesting that understanding and leveraging these policies can lead to improved profitability. The study recommends that bank managers foster a culture of innovation, address product differentiation strategies, and optimize resources to overcome challenges in product innovation. By doing so, commercial banks can harness the potential of digital innovations to improve financial performance and maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic banking environment of Kenya.

Digital innovations drive an organization’s digital transformation. While numerous studies focus on digital product and service innovation, digital process innovation and novel business models, management and leadership concepts are primarily investigated as enabling framing conditions in previous contributions. However, management and leadership concepts have changed dramatically in the digital era. The rise of digital technologies has led to companies acquiring large amounts of data. Moreover, novel technical solutions facilitate the analysis and processing of this data, leading to an increase in organizational transparency. Traditional leadership theories fail to explain the influence of digitalization and increasing transparency of leadership. In a digitized world, managers often face a trade-off when using data for management purposes. On the one hand, transparency leads to decreasing information asymmetries, allowing managers to monitor employees’ actions at low cost. On the other hand, employees demand self-organization and empowerment. In this context, new forms of control and employee engagement need to be designed. With our conceptual paper, we aim to provide a solution to the challenges of using transparency in leadership in a mutually beneficial way for managers and employees by introducing the concept of “inverse transparency.” We develop the concept building on the existing literature on transparency and leadership. We see inverse transparency as the basis for a new type of digital innovation, which we introduce as digital leadership innovation. Thus, we enhance current research on leadership approaches and digital innovation and create a theoretical basis for further research.

Self-organized or meta-organized contests? The two faces of innovation contests in digital product innovation

This paper examines the effect of digital innovation on cost stickiness in manufacturing firms, focusing on the underlying mechanisms and contextual factors. Using data from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2012 to 2023, we find that, first, for each one-unit increase in the level of digital technology, the cost stickiness index of enterprises decreases by an average of 0.4315 units, primarily through digital process innovation and digital business model innovation, whereas digital product innovation does not exhibit a statistically significant impact. Second, manufacturing servitization and the optimization of human capital structure are identified as key mediating mechanisms. Digital innovation promotes servitization by transitioning firms from product-centric to service-oriented business models, thereby reducing fixed costs and improving resource flexibility. It also optimizes human capital by increasing the proportion of high-skilled employees and reducing labor adjustment costs. Third, the effect of digital innovation on cost stickiness is found to be heterogeneous. Firms with high financing constraints benefit more from the cost-reducing effects of digital innovation due to improved resource allocation efficiency. Additionally, mid-tenure executives are more effective in leveraging digital innovation to mitigate cost stickiness, as they balance short-term performance pressures with long-term strategic investments. These findings contribute to the understanding of how digital transformation reshapes cost behavior in manufacturing and provide insights for policymakers and firms seeking to achieve sustainable development through digital innovation.

“New quality productivity” is an important term put forward by General Secretary Xi Jinping in September 2023 during his visit and research in Heilongjiang. It is a form of productivity relative to traditional productivity, characterized by high technology, high energy efficiency and high quality, with science and technology innovation as the core driving force, and with a wide range of permeability and integration. To develop new quality productivity, it is inseparable from scientific and technological innovation and the development of new industries. Digital economy and intelligence are important paths to develop new quality productivity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the path and its impact of digital intelligence innovation on productivity enhancement in the Greater Bay Area from a multi-dimensional perspective. The study first starts with the policy environment, outlines the policy background of the Greater Bay Area, comprehends the formation and development of the digital economy, and analyzes in depth how policies promote digital innovation. On this basis, the paper explores the specific impact of digital intelligence innovation on productivity and its path from three perspectives: technological, social and cultural. Under the technological perspective, this paper focuses on the technology-driven mechanism of digital intelligence innovation, including its direct impact on the optimization of industrial structure and productivity enhancement, and analyzes in detail the breakthroughs in major technological fields and their role in promoting the regional economy. Through technological innovation cases, it demonstrates how digital innovation can enhance productivity at the technological level and inject new vitality into the economy of the Greater Bay Area. The social perspective focuses on how digital intelligence innovation can enhance social governance, drive social benefits and public services, and explore the role of digital intelligence innovation in promoting social inclusion and narrowing the digital divide. By analyzing the specific practices and effects at the social level, it reveals the important role of digital intelligence innovation in social development. The cultural perspective analyzes the integration of digital intelligence innovation with regional culture and explores its role in promoting the cultural industry. It demonstrates the specific practices of the integration of culture and technology through typical cases, emphasizes the importance of regional cultural identity and innovation atmosphere, and proposes how to further enhance the productivity of the Greater Bay Area through cultural innovation. In the comprehensive analysis section, this paper integrates the analysis results from various perspectives and proposes the future development trend of digital intelligence innovation and its long-term impact on productivity enhancement in the Greater Bay Area. Finally, based on the findings, this paper proposes a series of policy recommendations and optimization paths, including strengthening policy support, promoting technological research and development, and fostering social inclusiveness and cultural innovation, with a view to providing scientific references and practical guidance for the future development of the digital intelligence economy in the Greater Bay Area.

The impact of COVID-19 on corporate digital innovation in China: A study based on the DDD model

Digital innovation is important for current manufacturing industries to achieve innovation. Based on dynamic capabilities theory, this paper empirically tests the effects of three digital innovation (DI) modes, namely, digital product innovation (DP), digital process innovation (DPS) and digital service innovation (DS), on innovation performance (IP) and their intermediate mechanisms. The findings show that (1) DP, DPS, and DS have significant positive effects on IP; (2) developmental capability and absorptive capability play an intermediary role in the influence of DI on IP; and (3) the adaptive capability has a masking effect on the influence of DI on IP. This study comprehensively measures DI modes based on the specific manifestations in the manufacturing industry and provides empirical evidence for manufacturing DI to improve IP. This article proposes, for the first time, that dynamic capabilities have different mediating effects and further reveals the impact mechanism of DI on IP.

As firms in the Schumpeterian environment of creative destruction seek to creatively edge out each other, frequent organisational capabilities’ re-invention tends to be a critical prerequisite for unlocking new capabilities to catalyse a business’ sustainability. Given the growing importance of self-disruption as an antecedent for organisational re-invention, this empirical research explores whether improved level of the optimisation of digital innovation’s generativity would leverage organisational capabilities’ re-invention to counter threats in the constantly changing Schumpeterian environment of creative destruction. Using a qualitative research method, the empirical research explored the opinions of twenty-five personnel that constituted of IT and electronics engineering personnel from five innovative IT and digitally abreast organisations in Glasgow-Scotland. The Delphi method that was accomplished in five sequential focus group discussions explored the impact of the emerging digital innovation technologies not only on new digital product or service innovations, but also on organisational capabilities’ re-invention. Although novel service and retail models as well as novel marketing approaches were found to emerge from the utilisation of different digital innovation technologies, major inhibitors of the optimisation of digital innovation’s generativity were still found to arise from deeply embedded analog business systems or the paradox of having to digitize and respond to the needs of the yet largely analog-skewed market. To address such a challenge, this study proposes a digital organisational capabilities’ re-invention model to agitate the need for most businesses to adopt digital business approaches as antecedents for leveraging the optimisation of digital innovation’s generativity. This will not only aid the creation of new products or services, but also re-invention of new capabilities to bolster a firm’s competitive edge. However, future research can still explore skills and competencies that are critical for digital innovation’s optimisation.

Digital innovation strategy: A framework for diagnosing and improving digital product and service innovation

Few external shocks have had as severe an impact on organisations as COVID-19. To date, research on how management can respond to such a far-reaching trigger event is lacking. Due to their economic relevance, family firms, which are typically resource-constrained and rely on idiosyncratic resource allocation behaviour, are of particular interest in this regard. Based on an inductive, multicase study of German family firms and building on rich longitudinal insights from more than 100 semistructured interviews and secondary data, we develop a novel framework explaining how an external shock such as the COVID-19 pandemic can trigger a change in family firms’ motives. Linking certain adapted motives of family firms (i.e., survival, utilisation, and opportunism) with their resource allocation behaviour during the crisis (in terms of resource preservation, resource recombination, and reliance on social boundary resources), we reveal how digital innovation (digital process innovation, digital product innovation, and digital business model innovation) originates as a result of a process of entrepreneurial action.

Given the omnipresence and profoundness of the ongoing pandemic from the Coronavirus disease 2019, its potential spread can be minimized through social distancing. However, this practice causes increasing difficulties and undesirability of traditional transactions or interactions. Accordingly, various manufacturing firms around the world have become more committed not only to accelerating the development of digital technologies, but also to integrating them with existing processes. In this study, we address an important issue of how manufacturing firms can adapt to the ever-changing volatility and unpredictable global business environment, and achieve sustainable growth by developing a strong supply chain management capability. Two specific interrelated research questions are considered: (1) How do supply chain management capabilities contribute to firm environmental performance; and (2) What are the sources of such capabilities? In so doing, we integrate various forms of digital innovation into a supply chain management capability logic to explore their antecedents and consequences. By using survey data from 272 manufacturing firms in China, we examine the relationship between three key forms of digital innovation (i.e., product, platform, and service) and firm environmental performance. Results show that digital product, platform, and service innovations all have positive contributions to supply chain management capability. In turn, supply chain management capabilities have a partial mediating effect between digital product innovation and firm environmental performance, but a full mediating effect between digital platform and service innovations and firm environmental performance.

Modern science has become collaborative and digital. The Internet has supported the emergence of scientific digital platforms that globally connect programmers and users of novel digital scientific products such as scientific interactive software tools. These digital scientific innovations complement traditional text-based products like journal publications. This article is focused on the scientific impact of a platform's programming community that produces these digital scientific innovations. The article's main theoretical argument is that beyond an individual's contribution efforts to these innovations, a new social structure affects his scientific recognition through citations of his tools in text-based publications. Taking a practice theory lens, we introduce the concept of a digital practice structure that emerges from the digital innovation work practice, performed by programmers who jointly work on a tool. This digital practice creates dependence forces among the community members in an analogy to Newton's gravity concept. Our model represents such dependencies in a spatial autocorrelative model. We empirically estimate this model using data of the programming community of nanoHUB in which 477 nanotechnology tool programmers have contributed more than 715 million lines of code. Our results show that a programmer's contributions to digital innovations may have positive effects, while the digital practice structure creates negative dependency effects. Colloquially speaking, being surrounded by star performers can be harmful. Our findings suggest that modeling scientific impact needs to account for a scientist's contribution to programming communities that produce digital scientific innovations and the digital work structures in which these contributions are embedded.