Championing Digital Innovation Success: The role of CDOs

The disruptive nature of digital innovation has led incumbent organizations to face enormous challenges and pressure. To address the fundamentally new nature of digital innovations, incumbents have established new managerial roles, such as Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), to champion innovation. We explore the role these innovation champions play for digital innovation success and argue that internal reorganization and the sourcing of external knowledge constitute important mechanisms through which CDOs might contribute to organizations' digital innovation success. We will empirically test our proposed research model using longitudinal data on the world's largest companies. Our study is expected to contribute to literature on knowledge recombination and innovation management by examining how innovation champions at the C-level use internal reorganization and sourcing of external knowledge to enhance digital innovation success.