From Point to Path, The Role of Innovation Trajectory in Application Development

Digital innovation research rarely examines the effects of innovation through the lens of application innovation as an evolutionary process. By scrutinizing the performance of applications in a highly competitive market, we classify application innovations and investigate their effects on performance in an application market. Advancing the concept of innovation trajectories whereby each innovation is regarded as a state and that continuous update to the same application constitute a state transition, we distinguish among four types of application innovation trajectories and put forth hypotheses regarding their varying effects on application performance metrics such as downloads and ratings. Insights derived from this study can be harnessed by app developers to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive marketplace through purposeful calibration of their innovation trajectory.