Digital twins and innovation management: a literature review, framework, challenge, and future direction

Managing innovation in firms is reshaped by the rapidly developing technology - digital twins (DTs). Considering DTs’ substitution for humans reorganises the firm's whole innovation process. This paper discusses and summarises the applications, challenges, and prospects of DTs in innovation management through a systematic literature review. Based on 48 articles and two major theories, this paper describes a new framework to reveal how DTs can compensate for human deficiencies. The results show that DTs can effectively break through the constraints humans face in innovation from four aspects: information searching, information processing, innovation idea measurement, and monitoring. This paper outlines DTs applications and difficulties for companies’ innovation management and makes recommendations.