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In recent years, digital technologies featuring hierarchical modular structure (von Briel et al., 2018) and granular structure (Kallinikos et al., 2013), such as mobile computing, cloud computing (Aceto et al., 2020; Gandhi & Singh, 2020; Yang, 2019), social media, 3D printing (Fatma et al., 2020; Haleem & Javaid, 2019), data management analytics (Haenlein et al., 2019; Law & Chung, 2020; Mohanty & Shankar, 2019), have been widely used in all aspects of the entrepreneurial field. These digital technologies have changed the inherent uncertainty of the entrepreneurial process and the way to deal with this uncertainty. Similarly, digital technologies have had a significant impact on new venture ideas and the studies on new venture ideas (Chalmers et al., 2019). To the best of our knowledge, if the product/service of new venture ideas rely on digital technologies, then we consider them as new digital venture ideas.
Entrepreneurship creativity, as the key to producing new ideas, shows the direction of entrepreneurship. Given the importance of venture ideas, there should be a solid theoretical foundation for its generation (Lomberg et al., 2017), especially for digital venture ideas. The existing research on digital venture ideas is still in the stage of theoretical concept construction, mainly focusing on the definition of its concepts (von Briel, Recker & Davidsson, 2018) and characteristics (von Briel, Davidsson & Recker, 2018). Although there are some scholars who have initially explored the impact of certain types of digital technologies on venture ideas, such as blockchain (Chalmers et al., 2019) and crowdsourcing platforms (Blohm et al., 2013), these studies mostly explored the general impact of digital technology on digital venture ideas.
As the starting point of the entire entrepreneurial process, it is very important to trace how entrepreneurial ideas are generated (Shepherd, 2015). Therefore, how new entrepreneurial ventures deal with major digital challenges have attracted much attention in entrepreneurial research (von Briel et al., 2018). This article focuses on exploring how companies 1) deal with disruptive challenges brought by digital technology, 2) identify business opportunities from massive amounts of digital information and, 3) spark digital venture ideas.
Entrepreneurial ability is essential to identifying business opportunities. On the one hand, an open digital environment has built a global stakeholder network without the limitations of time and place, making it possible for people with different abilities to participate in the same entrepreneurial activity (Nambisan, 2017). Networking capability refers to the capacity of the new venture to identify, establish, coordinate and develop a variety of relationships with different roles in the market (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Zou et al., 2010). In the digital environment, with support of digital technologies, it is important to build social relationships among entrepreneurs across regions and industries and to build digital social capital, which facilitates obtaining information about business opportunities and resources necessary to form digital venture ideas. On the other hand, IT capabilities, including information management capabilities (Simsek et al., 2009), information processing capabilities (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990), knowledge capabilities (Stoel & Muhanna, 2009) and cross-channel capabilities (Stopford & Baden-Fuller, 1994), are capabilities for entrepreneurs to obtain information related to business opportunities in a digital environment. In summary, networking capabilities and IT capabilities are both beneficial for sparking digital venture ideas.