The digital transformation of innovation and entrepreneurship: Progress, challenges and key themes

The emergence of novel and powerful digital technologies, digital platforms and digital infrastructures has transformed innovation and entrepreneurship in significant ways. Beyond simply opening new opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, digital technologies have broader implications for value creation and value capture. Research aimed at understanding the digital transformation of the economy needs to incorporate multiple and cross-levels of analysis, embrace ideas and concepts from multiple fields/disciplines, and explicitly acknowledge the role of digital technologies in transforming organizations and social relationships. To help realize this research agenda, we identify three key themes related to digitization—openness, affordances, and generativity—and, outline broad research issues relating to each. We suggest that such themes that are innate to digital technologies could serve as a common conceptual platform that allows for connections between issues at different levels as well as the integration of ideas from different disciplines/areas. We then summarize the contributions of the 11 papers presented in this Special Issue relating them to one or more of these themes and outlining their implications for future research.