Falcke, LukasLukasFalcke2023-04-132023-04-132023-02-20https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/107710Collaborative innovation increases firms' innovation and financial performance. However, so far, we lack an understanding of how collaborative innovation can tackle the grand challenges of our time. For instance, today's economy faces a ubiquitous digitalization and is required to completely decarbonize to limit the damages of global climate change. In response, this dissertation sets out to build, elaborate and test theory that contributes to a better understanding of collaborative innovation in the context of emerging digital technologies and climate change. It draws from several theoretical perspectives and presents three empirical studies at the inter-organizational, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. All three studies are situated in the context of a collaborative innovation initiative amongst 10 international energy utilities that jointly select and collaborate with 15 energy technology startups in an annual program. In 2016, these utilities with a joint revenue of over $173 Billion (USD) across more than 40 countries joined forces intending to explore and adopt startups' digital solutions that could help the utilities navigate the transition towards a low carbon energy future. Over four years, I collected various data in this setting, including 89 interviews, 217 non-public documents, 290 hours of observations, longitudinal digital trace and survey data with 233 observations of 74 individuals, financial information on 133 contracts, and expert ratings from impact investors. This 4-year database is the basis for the three studies of this dissertation. The first study aims to better understand how multiple firms can coordinate their innovative efforts to tackle grand challenges like climate change. It builds upon the theoretical lens of innovation ecosystems and combines a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and a multiple case study approach. More specifically, it investigates how incumbents and startups coordinate via ecosystem realignments and how and why these ecosystem realignments contribute to climate change mitigation. It presents a theoretical framework of ecosystem realignment for climate change mitigation that contributes to a better understanding of (1) the role of firms' collaborative innovation in tackling grand challenges and (2) the emergence of innovation ecosystems from within existing industries. The second study presents a multiple case study to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the open innovation back-end focusing on digital solutions. This framework contributes to the literature on knowledge integration and open innovation by uncovering three novel knowledge integration mechanisms and offering a tight theoretical connection between the open innovation literature and prior theorizing on the knowledge-based view of the firm. It further contributes by theorizing how and why these knowledge integration mechanisms are shaped by different digital interfaces that sit between the digital layers provided by the external solution provider and the receiving firm. The third study combines prior insights from social capital theory, online and offline networking, and digital features and affordances to develop a theoretical framework for online networking at virtual conferences. To test and substantiate it, I conduct a longitudinal mixed-methods study based on digital trace and survey data as well as complementary interviews. With an empirically qualified framework for online networking at virtual conferences, this study contributes to the literature by confirming the theory of purposeful feature utilization for social capital accumulation in the context of virtual conferences and extending it by (1) differentiating between structural and relational social capital, (2) expanding the set of investigated features, and (3) introducing contingency factors. In sum, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of collaborative innovation in the context of emerging digital technologies and climate change at the individual, organizational and inter-organizational levels. As such, it offers several insights for managers on how to conduct collaborative innovation in today's world facing the digitalization of everything and the need to rapidly decarbonize.enOpen InnovationInnovationTechnologieEDIS-5275sustainabilitydigital innovationDigitale TechnologieKollaborationNachhaltigkeitCollaborative innovationdoctoral thesis