Digital innovation: A bibliometric review and research agenda

The buzzword "digital innovation" is on everyone's mouth: Scholars, firms, governments, research centers, journalists, and even individual citizens, employ it daily to describe a wide range of processes, tools, and practices that characterize everyday activities. This growing interest has led to the accumulation of publications, models, and perspectives within the academic literature dealing with digital innovation. Academic publications on the phenomenon span across very diverse research streams, such as strategic management, organizational studies, information systems, innovation and technology management, and several more. As a consequence, such growth is accompanied by an inherent complexity and fragmentation of the understanding of the digital innovation phenomenon, both from a semantic and a hermeneutic perspective. This study seeks to make clarity in the understanding of digital innovation through a bibliometric literature review. We review the recent digital innovation literature by means of a co-word analysis, aimed at unveiling the structure of the concepts discussed in the scholarly literature and their hierarchy. Findings suggest that the topics debated in extant publications can be ascribed to six themes: (i) digitization; (ii) digital technologies; (iii) design; (iv) digital change; (v) digital business strategy; and (vi) open digital ecosystems. Building on the themes identified, this study highlights a series of relevant opportunities for future research in the digital innovation domain, with a twofold relevance. On the one hand, it provides relevant contributions for scholars, providing them with newly found clarity in understanding the digital innovation phenomenon and the existing themes and discourses, while at the same time suggesting the most promising research avenues for advancing the extant understanding. On the other hand, our findings can provide valuable insights to practitioners, opening up the "black-box" of digital innovation