Digital Innovation: a Bibliometric Review and Research Agenda

The buzzword "digital innovation” has recently received a growing interest, leading to the accumulation of publications, models, and perspectives within the academic literature. As a consequence, such growth is accompanied by an inherent complexity and fragmentation of its understanding, 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, suggesting how 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 topic and the relative connection between 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.