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The current landscape of business innovation is characterized by the prominent role of digital innovation platforms, ease of transferring internal and external knowledge flows, and growing demand for collaborative innovation driven by inter-firm collaboration. Advances in digital innovation platforms, such as open innovation communities, social media platforms and idea crowdsourcing platforms, have enabled companies to build inter-firm collaboration with their customers and partners to intelligently collect data from diverse and heterogeneous external knowledge resources (Chesbrough, 2019). With the increasingly collaborative nature of innovation, firms are shifting their focus from traditional closed innovation to collaboration with external parties and moving to more open forms of innovation that incorporate external ideas and knowledge in conjunction with internal research and development (Hoornaert, Ballings, Malthouse, & Van den Poel, 2017). This shift towards collaborative and open innovation paradigms has created new opportunities for organizations to expand their boundaries to promote innovation and disseminate ideas through digital innovation platforms. Aiming to improve their competitive position in the marketplace, companies are therefore looking for ways to leverage the flexible and malleable nature of digital collaboration platforms to co-innovate their products, services and business models (Chesbrough, 2019; Dong & Wu, 2015). In this context, collaborative innovation through digital technologies is becoming an important area of business innovation and transformation (Lozada, Arias-Pérez, & Perdomo-Charry, 2019).
The proliferation of digital innovation platforms, in conjunction with the growing role of inter-firm collaboration, has enabled firms to amass a wealth of data of various types and natures about their customers, partners and competitors (Arias-Pérez, Lozada, & Henao-García, 2020). The intelligence and competence of firms to analyze and transform these vast amounts of data into business value is a key factor in driving innovation, productivity and competitiveness (Jiang & Zhuang, 2019). To this end, a growing number of firms are increasingly leveraging business analytics (BA) applications to understand how BA can impact their innovation and entrepreneurship performance (Daradkeh, 2020; Duan, Cao, & Edwards, 2020). Especially, companies in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector have recently been faced with major challenges due to global competition and digital transformation (Lozada et al., 2019). Increasingly, they are striving to integrate BA applications into their innovation processes and use their potential to improve their innovation performance, information processing capabilities and collaboration with customers and partners (Ciampi, Demi, Magrini, Marzi, & Papa, 2021).