Organizing for digital innovation and transformation: bridging between organizational resilience and innovation management

Increased digitalization offers today’s organizations novel opportunities to enhance value propositions for customers, but also poses significant challenges for traditional businesses. To navigate through the difficult process of digital transformation in this turbulent environment, organizations need to integrate successful innovation management practices and build organizational resilience. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework that bridges between these two constructs: We describe innovation management as the continuous activity of anticipating and responding to ongoing trends in an organization’s environment through innovation, whereas we understand organizational resilience as the capability to adapt or transform an organization’s business. By analyzing two illustrative cases, we find indications that a successful digital transformation is not possible without one or the other. Furthermore, we contribute key factors for building organizational resilience and showcase two examples of how to leverage organizational resilience by transforming business models through digital innovation and, thus, avoiding the innovator’s dilemma.