Digital Transformation of the Firm’s Innovation Process – a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The innovation process is crucial for an organization to develop innovation, adopt changes and fight competition. Because it is ubiquitous across sectors, still highly dependent on the specifics of the developed innovation, the environment, and the market, its standardization, automation, and further digitalization is considered a serious challenge for innovation and for all organizations. In this study, we conduct a bibliometric analysis to reveal the current understanding and application of digitalization and digital transformation of the firm’s innovation process, as well as to outline trends in research, identify knowledge gaps, and call for further research on some still under-researched and extremely impactful topics for the innovation performance. The bibliometric analysis stepped on 518 scientific articles indexed in the Web of Science, meeting our inclusion criteria. Methods such as co-word analysis, conceptual and factorial analysis, thematic mapping, and historical evolution of the interaction between the innovation process and its digitalization over the years reveal insights and contributions to the digital transformation literature in the context of the innovation management theory striving to optimize the innovation performance on a firm level. The results disclose the current evidence of how innovations that occur at an organizational level achieve their digitalization through emerging technologies.