Shaping Innovation Outcomes: The Role of CIOs for Firms’ Digital Exploration

Digital technologies have rapidly pervaded firms, industries, and economic networks. This development has raised expectations that a firm’s chief information officer (CIO) will take a more strategic role, including innovation leadership and digital exploration. In this study, we argue from an upper echelons perspective that CIOs’ career variety and role tenure are critical in shaping the extent to which firms explore digital technologies in their patent portfolio, i.e., digital exploration. We expect a U-shaped relationship between CIO career variety and digital exploration, and an inverted U-shaped relationship between CIO role tenure and digital exploration. We test our conceptual model using a cross-industry panel of U.S. firms. As predicted, the results show high digital exploration for low and high career variety, and low digital exploration for moderate career variety, i.e., a U-shape. Conversely, they show low digital exploration for low and high role tenure, and high digital exploration for moderate role tenure, i.e., an inverted U-shape. These insights indicate that CIOs do become strategic leaders in exploring and shaping digital innovation.