Ricerc@Sapienza

Even if some researchers and publications have emphasized the growing role of digitalization in supporting interaction and value co-creation with clients (Kowalkowski et al., 2013; Lerch and Gotsch, 2015), the path toward the digital transformation or "digital journey" (Quinton and Simkin, 2017) might be complicated and present difficulties in practical implementation (Rusko, 2015). The efforts of firms toward digitalization means investing a non-negligible amount of resources in building new capabilities to support digitalization initiatives and to maximize the value creation potential lying at the core of relationships with customers. Therefore, companies need to sense, shape and capitalise on opportunities (Teece, 2007) by effectively identifying and arranging a specific, focused bundle of capabilities (Battistella et al., 2017), i.e. the digitalization capabilities.
Current literature shows limited insights on what constitutes digitalization capabilities (Parida et al., 2015) and how related capabilities enable firms in value co-creation processes and practices. Nowadays, research considerably developed around the interrelationships between digitalization and the development of digitalization capabilities with service innovation. According to Parida et al. (2015) ¿for most manufacturing companies, building a digitalization capability goes hand in hand with adopting a servitization strategy¿. Beyond this stream of research, there are still some considerable lacks in research on digitalization capabilities as foundations of the digital transformation path of companies.
One of the most interesting aspects in developing new knowledge on the topic of digitalization capabilities is its multidisciplinary nature and its power of attracting interest from different research fields. Nevertheless, this aspect can be considered also as a limitation and an open issue that could provide hints for future research directions.