Linking Digital Orientation and Data-Driven Innovations: A SAP-LAP linkages framework and research propositions

Data-driven technologies can have a broad impact on innovation management, making them a particularly complex and debatable topic that requires refinement from a research perspective. Along this line, this study aims to understand how digital orientation facilitates the adoption of digital technologies to improve innovation performance. Using organisational learning theory and dynamic capability theory within Situation-Actor-Process (SAP) Learning-Action-Performance (LAP) framework, the study systematically captures and analyses the complexities and interactions among the factors affecting data-driven innovation in a case organisation, ABC, a prominent automaker in India, and proposes actions that can lead to improvement in innovation performance through the coordination between situation, actors and the processes involved. We have identified the factors driving digital orientation, namely competition, customer expectations, government regulations and environmental norms and developed an understanding of how digital orientation facilitate the adoption of digital technologies, which in turn produce data-driven insights and help in developing capabilities to improve innovation performance. The study also highlights contingent variables that influence the relationship between data-driven insights produced by digital technologies and innovation performance. This study extends digitalisation and innovation literature by developing propositions and offering a conceptual model, which practitioners can employ to develop digital orientation and enablers for facilitating technology adoption, and innovation performance.