Digital Transformation Taking Centre Stage: How Is Digital Transformation Reshaping Entrepreneurial Innovation?

Abstract

The digital transformation has a profound implication for entrepreneurial innovation. In contrast, scholarly attention is mainly towards entrepreneurial innovation in pure digital businesses at the organisational and individual levels. However, our understanding of its implication at a higher level of aggregation, like the regional and national levels, is limited. Drawing on the national systems of innovation, I conceptualise digital transformation as changes in digital institutional and digitally relevant individual factors and examine its implication for digital business model innovation and entrepreneurial innovation at the country level. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis for a sample of 55 countries, I explore the causal configurations explaining the implication of digital transformation. The result indicates that digital transformation fuels digital business model innovation in specific and entrepreneurial innovation in general at the country level. This study contributes to understanding the broader implication of digital transformation and extends the boundary condition of the national systems of innovation in the digital context.