Digitalization-Based Innovation — A Case Study Framework

Abstract

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been leading innovation processes, where the upsurge of digital technology has overpowering implications on competitive positioning, firm’s value chains and overall business model. Value creation facilitated by emerging digital technologies alters costs, as well as process performance. Due to field research and in-depth interviews with owners and managers of SMEs in North-East Italy area, we combine and analyze evidence of the contingent challenges companies face while trying to redesign their business model. Our results point out that being able to accumulate and put into action external ideas can be vital in supplementing internal knowledge base and therefore crucial in escaping technological lock-ins; thus, imposing efforts toward digital transformation offers favorable outcoes.

Digitalization and Its Impact on Business

“…By making transactions faster thanks to digitalization, companies are automating a large part of their activity, resulting in a better return on human capital and better control of tasks, and de facto better profits for customers and consumers (Urbach et al 2018). Furthermore, digitalization fosters innovation, since the Internet promotes new service delivery models such as e-commerce platforms; even if their cost of deployment is relatively high, the cost of a transaction or of adding a user is relatively low, which allows companies to have better returns, competing with conventional competitors (Apostolov & Coco 2021).…”

Management and Production Engineering Review

“…Digitalization is the creation of high added value for the state, increasing the efficiency of the economy and business. All these measures will become a geopolitical advantage of Ukraine (Apostolov, and Coco, 2020;Skrypnyk et al, 2020).…”

Systematic literature review on technological transformation in SMEs: a transformation encompassing technology assimilation and business model innovation

“…Competitive pressure is related to the industry sectors in that SMEs are operating (Gatautis and Vitkauskaite 2009), and those SMEs that operate in a competitive environment are more likely to adopt new technologies (Hussain et al 2021) and change their BM (Pucihar et al 2019). SMEs' customers and/or suppliers can exert external pressure to adopt a particular technology, given contracts with specific customers (Apostolov and Coco 2021) and pressure from larger partners .…”

“…SMEs need to consider strategies for: acquiring knowledge and resources regarding the new technology (Groot et al 2019;Apostolov and Coco 2021); value creation according to the technology (Chan and Chung 2002;Coreynen et al 2017);technology alignment, i.e. vision, objective, structures (Venkatachalam et al 2014); enable functions to deliver value, e.g.…”