Quantifying the Digital Innovation Mindset

Abstract

The 'digital mindset' is frequently raised by both researchers and practitioners to be an essential factor of the human side of digitalization. Despite existing conceptualizations of the construct in different contexts, the literature provides no operationalization for quantitative research, so far. Our research pursues the goal to address the question of how the digital mindset can be measured in the context of digital innovation. Literature-based and Delphi study-based approaches were used to develop various types of scales which were pre-validated by experts and statistically validated. For content validation, 35 participants were interviewed and subsequently completed the developed scales. The resulting interview statements were rated by two independent raters and the results were compared with the scale results. The correlations indicate that the developed survey scales can serve as proxies for the qualitative approach, which is assumed to measure the 'true' level of the digital mindset. In the future, researchers can choose from different scales based on their requirements for precision and efficiency (i.e., time needed to complete the survey items).1