Business Innovations and Digital Transformation: Trend, Comparative and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The rapid development of digital technologies, digital transformation, business innovation, and the emergence of such technologies as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things provides significant potential for transforming business processes and creating new innovative models. The trend analysis conducted in this article (using the Google Trends tool) around the world for 2009-2023 showed that public interest in “business innovation” was almost constant until 2021 (according to the GT Scale, it ranged from 0.25 to 0.5). After 2021, it increased (according to the GT Scale, it was more than 0.5). At the same time, public interest in “digital transformation” has significantly increased since 2014, reaching almost maximum values in 2020-2023 (0.75 – 1.00 on the GT Scale). This confirms a growing need in society to acquire new knowledge related to the ability of businesses to adapt to digital transformation, including through creating innovative developments. Unlike trend analysis, bibliometric and comparative analyses identify trends in developing interest in this topic not among ordinary citizens – users of the Google search platform ‒ but among scientists who publish the results of their research either in monographs or in authoritative peer-reviewed scientific journals indexed by leading scientometric databases. The comparative analysis conducted in the article using the Google Books Ngram Viewer (Google) tool, which displays the frequency of references to relevant terms in English-language books for 2009-2019 worldwide, showed similar trends: the persistence of scholars’ attention to business innovation, while their interest in digital transformation is growing: in 2009-2013 – a slight increase, in 2013-2019 ‒ a significant increase. In the bibliometric analysis, a five-level mechanism for limiting the research sample was applied: only English-language and most recent (for 2018-2022) scientific articles indexed by the Scopus database in the subject area of Business, Management and Accounting were subject to analysis. Based on these limitations, the research sample for the keyword “digital transformation” was reduced from 12131 to 1700 papers, and for “business innovation” from 865 to 70. The analysis of the published articles, their views and citations, carried out using the SciVal tool, fully confirmed the conclusions drawn from the trend and comparative analysis results. In terms of digital transformation, the leaders in terms of the number of papers and the number of views are Germany, Italy, the UK and the US; in terms of citations – the UK, Germany, the US, and in terms of individual scientists – Brazil and Germany. As for the topic of business innovation, the United States is the undisputed leader in all these parameters, followed by China and the United Kingdom. Some scientists from Germany and Spain also attract the attention of the academic community (in terms of views and citations). Changes in trends and research priorities in each of the studied topics were identified and described using SciVal (analysis of the reference dynamics to the top 50 keywords in articles for 2018-2023). For example, in 2023, compared to 2022, scientific interest in issues related to “value creation” (+61.5%), “incumbents” (+66.7%), “service economy” (+83.3%), “digital marketing” (+75.0%), and “design thinking” (+150.0%) increased the most. VOSviewer software made it possible to cluster the scientific work by thematic areas. The largest cluster on digital transformation relates this concept to small and medium-sized businesses and technologies, and the largest cluster on business innovation relates it to the development of small and medium-sized enterprises and the protection of property rights.