Driving Digital Innovation Activities by Leveraging Innovation-oriented Leadership

Academy of Management Proceedings, vol. 2022

Abstract

Industrial incumbents aim to foster their competitive position by applying digital technologies in their innovation activities, either through process optimizations or via business model innovations. Despite these ambitions, they often struggle with implementing effective measures to tackle digital transformation. We show the important role of innovation-oriented leadership in driving internal and external collaborations, which prove essential to increase the digitization contribution to innovation activities. We surveyed top managers of established industrial companies to provide empirical evidence that innovation-oriented leadership does not have a direct influence on the digitization contribution to business activities, but is fully mediated by internal and external collaboration. Based on supplemental objective data, we show additionally that a high digitization contribution in business model innovation has a beneficial effect on the sales performance.

Authors 2

1. Lukas Moschko Aachen Institute for Technology and Innovation Management

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Technology and Innovation Management at RWTH Aachen

2. Vera Blažević

   Radboud University Nijmegen

   Affiliation as printed

   Radboud U. Nijmegen