Digital technologies and disruptive innovation: from processors to platforms

Innovation concepts, models, and research provide greater insights into strategies for, and management of, digital innovation (Tidd and Bessant, 2018b). For example, the growing prominence of platforms and ecosystems in digital innovation, especially through enabling technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), reinforce the need to develop or acquire complementary assets to function and capture value (Teece, 2018). Such complementary assets are central to the creation and delivery of value, by leveraging monetizing opportunities, for example: “Systems integrators, platforms, and multi-sided markets share what is sometimes referred to as a business ecosystem. For managers, the ecosystems perspective holds the promise of opening up the wider entrepreneurial and collaborative space that a new technology affords, and provides room for novel business models to succeed” (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger, 2013, p. 424). Therefore, the focus shifts from the potential for digitalization of products and services (Echterfeld and Gausmeier, 2018) to the creation of broader platform-based innovations (Inoue and Tsujimoto, 2018).