Partnering for Digital Innovation: A Competence-Based Study.

Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm and research on microfoundations of organizational capabilities, we develop and empirically analyze a theoretical model that examines the role of cognition of IT leadership in achieving organizational-level digital maturity and the mechanisms through which it affects the innovative outcomes of the exploration-focused outsourcing projects. We find that Chief Information Officers’ (CIOs) internal beliefs regarding the importance of capabilities for the IT function seem to not directly affect the innovation outcomes of third-party collaborations. Instead, this relationship is mediated by the degree of digital maturity the company has managed to achieve.