Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship
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ItemWhat Makes Data Possible? A Sociotechnical View on Structured Data Innovations( 2021-01-05)Drawing from the theory of digital objects, this paper examines the distinction between structured and unstructured data as carriers of facts. We argue that data do not ‘have’ a structure but are made by a structure that confers data their capacity to represent contextual facts. We employ a case vignette involving XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and its use in statutory financial reporting to illustrate and explore the sociotechnical nature of data and to describe what we call data innovations: new valuable ways to render phenomena as data. We find that data structure is best viewed as a matter that is relative to a purpose in a context. Theorizing data from a sociotechnical perspective could evolve to provide, in effect, the material science of digital economy.
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ItemUnderstanding the intrinsic nature of the trends of digital innovation: A main path analysis( 2021-01-05)Digital innovation plays an increasingly important role in an organizational context. During the past two decades, IS scholars have witnessed a rapid growth of research interest in digital innovation. However, its nature and implications are still vague. More specifically, the intrinsic nature of digital innovation is changing with the development of technology and society. The purpose of this article is to examine digital innovation from various perspectives and thus provide potential research directions for future research. This study adopts main path analysis, a citation-based systematic review method, collecting and analyzing 848 digital innovation-related academic articles. It traces the most significant paths and reveals seven popular research themes, including digital innovation management, recombination approach, entrepreneurship, transformation, institution and management control, and data-driven value capture. This study furthers the understanding of digital innovation in the current IS research and presents research opportunities that are valuable for future work.
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ItemTowards an Intra- and Interorganizational Perspective: Objectives and Areas of Activity of Digital Innovation Units( 2021-01-05)Incumbent firms increasingly strive to embrace digital innovation, often via implementing dedicated digital innovation units (DIUs). As seizing the rapid and various digital innovation-related market movements may be overwhelming for an individual DIU, collaborations within ecosystems are perceived as crucial for continuously recognizing business opportunities and threats. Although this is a growing field of interest in recent research, insights into the objectives of DIUs and the consequent activities for effectively handling digital innovation are yet scarce. We address this issue by synthesizing 28 cases on DIUs through a qualitative meta-analysis. The analysis revealed that while DIUs enforce an intraorganizational cultural and overarching organizational design change, they also impose an interorganizational perspective with customer-oriented digital expertise and innovation, as well as cultivation of digital innovation ecosystems. Thus, we contribute to the existing DIU research by clarifying these objectives and extending them to achieve a conscious interorganizational perspective with accompanying activities.
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ItemThe Sustainable Value of Open Banking: Insights from an Open Data Lens( 2021-01-05)Open Banking has emerged as an initiative which has the potential to disrupt the retail banking sector by improving competition and innovation in the industry. But is Open Banking capable of producing sustainable value? This is a question that is relevant for all open initiatives given the transfer of value from incumbents to newer entities with the aim of improving innovation and customer benefit. It is particularly relevant for Open Banking at this stage of its maturity. This study undertakes a global analysis (across 17 regions) on Open Banking through the lens of Open Data. We contribute to the open data lens and provide insights into the potential success of Open Banking. Specifically, we synthesise a definition of Open Banking, we highlight that Open Banking is not entirely ‘open’ compared to other open initiatives, and we discuss how Open Banking may provide sustainable value for consumers, Fintech’s, and traditional banks.
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ItemThe Quest for New Theoretical Logics of Digital Innovation: Linking Properties of Digital Artifacts with their Conceptualizations in Organizations( 2021-01-05)In order to develop theories of digital innovation, it is necessary to explicitly consider the digital artifact that lends digital innovation its distinguishing features. Recent theoretical contributions elaborate the distinguishing properties of digital artifacts. These contributions have, however, not yet been systematically connected with conceptualizations that are used to frame empirical studies. A systematic review of empirical studies in Information Systems literature on digital innovation is conducted with a focus on how digital artifacts are being conceptualized. The paper contributes by discussing how each of the four conceptualizations enable the demonstration of a particular property of digital artifacts. This summary results in a meta-theory of artifacts in digital innovation. Based on this, a research agenda is constructed, with questions that would lead us closer to finding new theoretical logics of digital innovation.
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ItemThe Ecosystem of Machine Learning Methods( 2021-01-05)Machine learning (ML) is a rapidly evolving field and plays an important role in today’s data-driven business environment. Many digital innovations in domains as diverse as healthcare, banking, energy, and retail are powered and enabled by ML. Examples include search engines, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. A key element in ML innovation is the advancement of the underlying methods, which specify how machines should algorithmically process, derive patterns, and learn from data for a given decisioning task. The speed at which this is happening is exponential, with researchers leveraging and building upon existing building blocks as well as introducing entirely new methods. Given the speed, scale, and complexity, understanding this complex evolving ML method space can be challenging. What methods are core and peripheral to ML? Which methods span task areas? How are ML methods evolving? In this exploratory research paper, I address these questions by (1) framing the ML method space and (2) visualizing the evolving structure of the ML methods ecosystem. The results reveal several foundational ML building blocks, different coupling levels between ML areas, and variable speeds of evolution. The study also provides insights into how digital innovation evolves at an algorithmic level. I discuss the implications of the findings and describe opportunities for future ML ecosystem-focused research.
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ItemResourcing Digital Competence in Product Development: A Computational Study of Recruitment at Volvo Cars( 2021-01-05)Competence renewal is an intrinsic part of digital transformation. However , digital competence is generic competence – it is function-agnostic and not tied to the specifics of a firm’s product portfolio. It typically does not fit established institutional structures. Therefore, it is particularly complicated for product-developing firms to develop digital competence, since functional decomposition and profound specialization prevent necessary knowledge mobility. We adopt a resourcing perspective to analyze how Volvo Cars identified, engaged, and deployed human resources to balance supply and demand for digital competence. Our study relies on over 5000 published job postings, which we compared with the European Skills, Competences, and Occupations (ESCO) framework on the basis of natural language processing. While broadly confirming the idea that digital competence spread from IT departments into mainstream operations, our study also demonstrates asymmetry in the resourcing environment, reflecting tension between emerging and existing structures. Our study also reveals a tendency to close digital competence deficits through external recruitment rather than internal hiring, and by creating new positions rather than replacements.
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ItemIdea Management in a Digital World: An Adapted Framework( 2021-01-05)The continuing emergence of new digital technologies, platforms and infrastructure has opened unprecedented possibilities for innovation. Eager to seize these opportunities, many organizations adopt idea management programs to help leverage their employees’ ideas for digital innovations. However, we lack an integrated understanding of how the logics of digital innovation affect the practice of idea management. We therefore pose the following research question: “How can idea management programs be conceptualized in light of digital innovation?”. Drawing on the disparate yet complementary conceptual building blocks of open innovation and problem-solution pairs, we develop a revised conceptualization of how idea management is practiced in a digital context. Our framework suggests that idea management programs can be used by organizations as orchestration and cognitive sensemaking devices to support the matching, forking, merging and refinement of ideas. These insights shed fresh light on how innovations form and evolve in a pervasively digital world.
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ItemHybrid Sport Configurations: The Intertwining of the Physical and the Digital( 2021-01-05)The motivation for this research follows from our observation of the increasing influence of digitalization on sporting activities and the emergence of physical-digital hybrid sport. While traditional, physical sport gradually embraces digital elements and experiences to the game, born-digital eSport increasingly involves physical elements in its setting (e.g., offline tournaments). In this paper, we investigate various physical-digital hybrid configurations of existing and emerging sporting activities and their implications for the fusing of the digital and physical worlds. Based on an inductive approach and drawing from existing literature on physical-digital hybridity, we conceptualize four sport clusters (digitally supported sport, digitally augmented sport, digitally replicated sport, and digitally translated sport) along three dimensions: the sporting activities (especially in terms of the relationship between the digital and physical components), the sporting arena, and actors’ influence. Based on our conceptualization and observations, we discuss implications for both the information systems and sport management domains.
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ItemDigital Transformation through Collaborative Platformization: A Study of Incumbent-Entrepreneur Relations( 2021-01-05)The paper examines the unfolding of digital transformation in and the platformization of an industrial firm. To enable transformation despite a complex and heterogeneous IT landscape, a platformization strategy was followed and an entrepreneurial firm was established to be the strategic partner in the transformation journey. We examine the collaboration between the two firms based on empirical material covering the period 2016-2020. The paper contributes to the literature on digital transformation, as it illuminates the dynamic role of strategic partnerships in such processes. We also contribute to the literature on digital platforms and collaborative nature of governing the process of platform development by identifying three modes of collaborating and adapting.