The impact of the 4th industrial revolution on the design fields of innovation management

At present, topics around the digitalization like Big Data, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Smart Something or Artificial Intelligence receive high attention. This increasing trends results in the digitalization and networking of products and value chains that offer great potential to secure and expand the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry. In addition to technical innovations, business model innovations as well as product or service innovations and the combination of both lead to unique selling points that are only made possible by new technologies. Against this background, digitization can be seen as a key driver of innovation. Within a very short time, start-ups have brought disruptive innovations into the market and turned entire industries upside down. While the manufacturing industry in particular has concentrated on the development of incremental innovations for a long time, the share of disruptive innovations is increasing continuously. This result s in the need that companies have to modify the design of their innovation management to encourage disruptive innovations. On the one hand, it is important to make perfect use of day-to-day business; on the other hand, new subject areas must also be developed and explored in order to produce disruptive innovations. This two-handed approach to innovation management is also known as ambidexterity. In the course of this paper, the specific influences of digitization on the innovation management of companies in the manufacturing industry will be determined. On this basis, the particular challenges and their effects on the individual design fields of innovation management will be identified. As a result, we identified concrete design fields and belonging tasks that need to be modified from the perspective of increasing digitalization. Furthermore, we give first recommendations how the tasks of each design field could be adapted in order to encourage disruptive innovations.