Tradition Meets Modernity – Learning from Start-ups as a Chance to Create Digital Innovation in Corporations

In the digital era, most corporations with established structures are in an innovation dilemma: Although they are aware of the importance of digital innovation, they face challenges in creating, with ever shorten innovation cycles. This may explain why corporations have been increasingly collaborating with start-ups with the often superficial aim of learning from them. While we know that different types of collaboration exist, empirically, we understand relatively little about the influential factors in such collaborations. Based on a qualitative study with 56 interviews, in this research-in-progress paper, we have taken a closer look at knowledge acquisition. For instance, we have found that an initially open-minded attitude of corporate employees towards collaboration with start-ups probably has an influence on the success of knowledge acquisition. With our findings, we hope to produce a stronger understanding of what factors influence the knowledge acquisition in the context of collaboration focused on creating digital innovations

Finding the Next Unicorn: When Big Data Meets Venture Capital

Venture capital (VC) has been growing rapidly in recent years. So far the screening and evaluation of potential startups as investment objects largely depends on the venture capitalist’s personal experience, network and qualitative evaluations. In the era of big data, the advent of new data sources and analytic techniques enables a data-driven investment process. Grounded in systems theory and the theory of complementarity, this study reports the findings from an exploratory study of 13 VC firms that synthesize and use novel data sources. Our analysis shows that the data-driven approach, in particular, impacts the deal origination and screening stages of investment. It leads to informational and transactional benefits, which lower operational costs in the short term and enlarge the potential return on investment of a VC firm in the long term. We contribute to the literature by shedding light on how various data sources complementarily lead to additional business value

‘Forewarned is Forearmed’: Overcoming Multifaceted Challenges of Digital Innovation Units

Due to rapidly changing customer needs, enterprises seek to innovate continuously. Incumbent firms need to improve their capabilities to develop, evaluate, and implement digital innovations. Recently, many enterprises established digital innovation units (DIUs) for accelerating their digital innovation endeavors. Although numerous units exist in practice, the number of negative press headlines that address failure or dissolution of DIUs is increasing. Based on a literature review and a qualitative cross-industry study with eleven enterprises, we discuss the relation of DIUs to organizational concepts like ambidexterity, bimodal, and trimodal IT. Furthermore, we substantiated seven multifaceted challenges of DIUs, which span across stages of innovation development, organizational units, and hierarchical levels. Based on these findings, we developed three recommendations for responses to these challenges: (1) DIU-Business-IT collaboration across stages, (2) network of executive responsibilities, and (3) general digital awareness of the organization as a whole

The Role of Digital Leadership and Digital Transformation under the influence of Covid 19

Leadership plays an essential role in the management of an organization since it would sometimes determines the survival of the organization. Leadership reflects how the leaders of organizations would deploy the resources and manpower of the organizations, and what resolutions the leaders would take in urgent situations. However, organizations encountered a huge hurdle under COVID-19 since it has cast impediments to the operations of the companies. This paper aims to explore the role of digital leadership in digital transformation during the pandemic. In addition, this paper also explores the way that leaders could push forward the digital transformation to enable the company to adapt new market environment that their companies are in. Therefore, this paper capitalized on the research opinion of Saunders with interpretivism as the research philosophy, and the quantitative method was adopted to enable the execution of an interview. The paper found that digital leadership and digital transformation can advance the development of organizations, which is mainly demonstrated by the improvement of confidence in digital leadership. Besides, the productivity, self-efficiency, and self-sufficiency of employees would be enhanced, thereby providing more opportunities for employees. This paper also found that digital transformation could drive the digital leadership of organizations. Furthermore, leaders' rethinking was also enhanced so that leaders could figure out what approaches should be taken in an emergency. All of these findings show that digital transformation has a proactive impact on digital leadership