How Digital Tools Align with Organizational Agility and Strengthen Digital Innovation in Automotive Startups

• Digital tools can be an enabler for automotive startups to strengthen their digital innovation capability. Still, few empirical studies describe how automotive startups apply digital tools to do this. Digital innovation capability is essential for survival in a volatile global digital marketplace. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative study based on 23 interviews with nine global automotive startups to understand how they apply digital tools to strengthen their digital innovation. The results showed that automotive startups use cloud services almost exclusively for their business. We conclude that startups choose to use digital tools as SaaS to strengthen their organizational agility and digital innovation initiatives. It harmonizes with their agile culture, effectively enabling innovation collaborations between employees internally and with external actors enabling rapidness to market. SaaS providers' startup programs enabled startups to remain focused on their innovation initiatives and not worry about scalability since the solutions scaled from the start. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Digital Tools

Organizational Agility

Digital Innovation Capability

Agile Culture

Automotive Startups

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)