Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of every industry. With the emergence of big data, the industries, and more especially textile and apparel (T&A) industry, are on the brink of relationships with consumers, suppliers, and competitors. They need to handle different scenarios with a multitude of complex correlations and dependencies between them and uncertainties arising from human interaction. It has become imperative for them to manage huge amounts of data for the optimization of decision-making processes. In such circumstances, AI techniques have shown promise in every segment of the T&A value chain, from product discovery to robotic manufacturing. The potential wide-ranging applications of AI in T&A industry have found their ways into design support systems to T&A recommendation systems, intelligent tracking systems, quality control, T&A forecasting, predictive analytics in supply chain management or social networks and T&A e-commerce. The research recourses to the qualitative method in the form of systematic literature review and in-depth interviews from senior management people and industry experts. Findings identify the dimensions of AI to develop dynamic capability along with its potential impact and probable challenges. As such, the findings contribute to relevant literature and offer useful insights for academia and practitioners.

Although innovation from analytics is surging in the manufacturing sector, the understanding of the data-driven innovation (DDI) process remains a challenge. Drawing on a systematic literature review, thematic analysis and qualitative interview findings, this study presents a seven-step process to understand DDI in the context of the UK manufacturing sector. The findings discuss the significance of critical seven-step in DDI, ranging from conceptualisation to commercialisation of innovative data products. The results reveal that the steps in DDI are sequential, but they are all interlinked. The proposed seven-step DDI process with solid evidence from the UK manufacturing and research implications based on dynamic capability theory, institutional theory and TOE framework establish the building blocks for future studies and industry practice.