‘I digitize so I exist’. Searching for critical capabilities affecting firms’ digital innovation

Taking into account the increasing importance of digitalization to characterize companies’ competitive advantages, and the contextual growing research interest in digital transformation, this paper focuses on dynamic capabilities affecting firms’ digital innovation in terms of creation of new offerings, processes or solutions by using a wide range of digital technologies. By means of quantitative research on a sample of managers of 210 firms in Italy, the study performs an ordinary least squares regression to investigate whether and how different knowledge-based capabilities support the process to develop digital innovation, taking into consideration the moderating effect of social media. Despite some limitations, essentially due to the geographical focus of the analysis, the paper contributes to better understand the effect of digitalization in the distinguishing context of the Italian companies, providing useful insights to rethink firms’ innovation models.