Co-innovating the generative future - How media organizations can sustain a competitive advantage in the dynamic digital media landscape

Technological advances and digitization have significantly changed the media landscape, creating the need for continuous innovation to sustain a competitive advantage in the dynamic, fast-paced digital media landscape. It was suggested that to maximize the possibilities in the digital media landscape, new digital innovations need to be generative, so that they can be used to create value. In developing generative innovations, it is important that the five dimensions that delineate generativity are implemented in the innovation. More specifically, these five dimensions pertain to: adaptability, capacity of leverage, accessibility, transferability, and ease of mastery. However, it was found that a single organization’s resources are often too limited to satisfy the need for continuous innovation since they either lack finances, or knowledge capabilities, or resources. This can be solved by opening up the organization’s innovation department, and employ a model of open innovation. More specifically, a model of co-innovation. For this, there were two main components that need to be satisfied for successful co-innovation: co-innovation collaborations through strategic partnerships, and the media innovation process. The problem however, is that little was known about how these co-innovative collaborations function in the digital media landscape, as well as how innovations can be made generative in the media innovation process. Hence, by carrying out 10 expert interviews, this study tried to answer the question on how media organizations can leverage strategic partnerships to co-innovate generative innovations. A thematic analysis was conducted according to themes that were derived from the literature, with strategic partnerships and the media innovation process as the main themes. The findings of the thematic analysis suggest that there are six main success factors that constitute what is needed for media organizations to leverage strategic partnerships to coinnovate generative innovations. These six factors were: organizational alignment, creating the right team, co-designing the co-innovation project, continuous interactivity, continuous validation, and continuous optimization, including the optimization for the five dimensions that delineate generativity to ensure the innovation can be made generative. The key findings of this research add to co-innovation literature not only by substantiating what was already known, but also by illustrating how key success factors in the strategic partnership process as well as the media innovation process work and how they need to be approached, rather than just focusing on the why and what of the topic.