In the digital era, businesses are increasingly facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Digital innovation has become a crucial driver for high-quality development and maintaining a competitive edge. Despite its importance, there is a significant gap in the literature concerning the comprehensive understanding and multidimensional deconstruction of the internal processes of digital innovation. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the dimensions of digital innovation, developing a robust measurement scale, and investigating its impact on enterprise performance. The significance of this research lies in providing a deeper theoretical understanding of digital innovation and offering practical tools for businesses to enhance their innovation practices.
To achieve these objectives, the study employs grounded theory methodology, incorporating perspectives from recombination innovation, supply-demand interaction, and service-dominant logic. The interview data came from managers of four manufacturing enterprises, especially managers of information or digitalization departments. Through this rigorous process, two critical dimensions of digital innovation were identified: enterprise design recombination and user use recombination. Enterprise design recombination focuses on how enterprises reorganize resources on a large scale to enhance efficiency and innovation capacity. User use recombination emphasizes the reconfiguration of resources through use, highlighting the role of users as active participants in the innovation process. From two identified dimensions, a digital innovation scale comprising 28 items was developed. The scale underwent thorough validation processes, including exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), to assess its reliability and validity. The scale demonstrated high internal consistency and construct validity, making it a reliable tool for measuring various aspects of digital innovation within enterprises.
The study further employs this scale to empirically examine the impact of digital innovation on enterprise performance. Data is collected from 254 enterprises across the manufacturing industry through questionnaires. The analysis utilizes regression analysis to test the hypothesized relationships between digital innovation dimensions and enterprise performance. The results show that both enterprise design recombination and user use recombination significantly contribute to improving enterprise performance. These results indicate a strong positive correlation between digital innovation and enterprise performance, validating the predictive validity of the developed scale.The study offers several key conclusions. Firstly, the reconceptualization of digital innovation as a recombination of resources provides a nuanced understanding of its internal processes. This perspective shifts the focus from merely applying digital technologies and developing digital products to emphasizing the reconfiguration and integration of digital technologies, data, and experiential knowledge. This aligns with identified characteristics of digital innovation such as reconfigurability, data homogenization, and self-referentiality.Secondly, the study underscores the importance of the interactive roles of both enterprises and users in the innovation process, incorporating the supply-demand interaction and service-dominant logic perspectives. This highlights the role of users as active participants and collaborators in digital innovation, addressing the call for greater focus on user innovation and extending the theoretical foundation for continuous innovation in the digital context.Thirdly, the developed digital innovation scale serves as a valuable tool for subsequent empirical research, offering a robust framework for assessing the multidimensional characteristics of digital innovation. By examining the relationship between digital innovation and enterprise performance, this study validates and extends existing discussions on the positive impact of digital innovation on enterprise performance, underscoring its importance as a strategic choice for future business development.
In conclusion, this study offers a comprehensive exploration of digital innovation dimensions, develops a validated measurement scale, and demonstrates the positive impact of digital innovation on enterprise performance. The innovative perspective on digital innovation’s internal processes and the interactive roles of enterprises and users significantly enriches the theoretical discourse and provides practical guidance for businesses navigating digital transformation. This study not only enhances academic understanding but also equips practitioners with valuable tools to leverage digital innovation for sustained competitive advantage.