How Companies Develop a Culture for Digital Innovation: A Multiple-Case Study

Companies are constantly facing new challenges through digital technologies, as they can cause rapid changes in their business environment. Digital innovations can offer the opportunity to gain competitive advantages, but in practice, companies often struggle to create the conditions for this. Developing a culture for digital innovation is an important capability that companies need to build. It includes appropriate organizational structures, working methods, skills, and new ways of thinking in the innovation process. This has been explored in previous research at a high level of abstraction. Our paper complements past findings with a detailed study of what activities companies are doing in practice and what methods they are using to support these activities to pave the way for digital innovation in their organization. For this purpose, a multiple-case study has been conducted. As a theoretical basis, we use the dynamic capability approach. We obtain how the capability for developing a digital culture is substantiated by microfoundations and underlying activities.