Digital Technologies for Supporting Firms' Absorptive Capacity: A Systematic Review

A firm can improve its innovation processes by accessing useful external knowledge, profiting from the Open Innovation outside-in process. However, to benefit from the flow of knowledge from the firm's outside boundary, the firm's Absorptive Capacity - the ability to correctly acquire, assimilate, transform, and exploit external knowledge according to the innovation needs – plays a pivotal role. So, firms must equip themselves with relevant tools to support all Absorptive Capacity activities. Despite digital technologies seem to be very promising tools, currently, their supportive role in firms' Absorptive Capacity activities is understudied, hence generating a literature gap related to a very rising topic. This work aims to contribute to filling this gap by proposing a structured literature review of academic research papers from the Scopus database. The main results of this research are three: i. the recognition of the most studied digital tools in supporting Absorptive Capacity activities; ii. the explanation of how the identified digital tools support Absorptive Capacity activities; iii. the impact of using digital tools for supporting Absorptive Capacity activities on firm performance. Contributions are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, this work is a first step in linking Open Innovation, Absorptive Capacity, and Information and Communication Technologies theories, often studied separately. In addition, the proposed literature review highlights new possible topics to be researched to improve the scientific knowledge about the phenomenon under investigation. Practically, the results of this work lead firms' innovation managers to select the most appropriate digital tools to support Absorptive Capacity activities to enhance firms' performance.