IT-ENABLED BUSINESS INNOVATION: DOES CIO CAPABILITY MATTER? A PERSPECTIVE FROM INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY

Today IT has evolved from a mere efficiency tool to enabling business innovation and providing strategic value. As the highest level IT leader in organizations, CIO should be largely responsible for the success of IT-enabled business innovation. CIO must possess necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to lead IT staff, business partners, and even high-level executives in IT-enabled business innovation. However, as IT innovation researchers have just begun to look at business transformation and innovation resulted from the application of new IT, insights on how CIO can leverage IT to enable business innovation are still scant. We aim to address the question of whether and how CIO capability impact on the success of IT-enabled business innovation. Anchoring on the theory of institutional entrepreneurship, we propose a conceptual model describing that CIO’s political savvy, communicative ability, strategic IT and business knowledge have positive impact on the success of ITenabled business innovation, through the mediating role of innovation legitimacy. The findings are expected to provide several theoretical implications for the areas of IT innovation and CIO effectiveness

INNOVATION WANTED: A LITERATURE REVIEW ON INNOVATION SOURCING ENGAGEMENTS

Recent research shows the increasing importance of generating innovative IT solutions within information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships. This literature review sheds further light on our current body of knowledge with regard to such innovation sourcing engagements. Based on a structured literature review and using citation network analysis methods, we (1) identify key articles and authors covering the topic of innovation sourcing, (2) analyze the development of innovation sourcing in ITO relationships over time, and (3) evaluate relevant concepts for innovation sourcing engagements in practice. Our main finding is the identification, categorization, and relevance ranking of 103 concepts related to innovation sourcing. Additionally, we identify research gaps as well as confirm that citation network analysis is a proper method for the visualization and analysis of literature in the research stream of innovation sourcing. We emphasize further research on innovation sourcing engagements and provide distinctive research directions for the research community

Auf dem Weg zum digitalen Krankenhaus : Eine empirische Analyse über die gemeinsame Wirkung von Intrapreneurship und Informationsmanagement

Das Informationsmanagement steht im Zentrum erfolgreicher eHealth-Innovationsprozesse von Krankenhäusern. Im Kontext komplexer, zum Teil tradierter Krankenhausstrukturen kann die Gestaltungsfähigkeit des Informationsmanagements durch eine ausgeprägte Intrapreneurship-Kultur erhöht werden, wovon vermutlich auch der Digitalisierungsgrad der Einrichtungen profitiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund verfolgte die vorliegende Studie zwei Forschungsfragen: (1.) Welche Effekte hat Intrapreneurship auf den Digitalisierungsgrad der Krankenhäuser und (2.) inwiefern werden diese Effekte durch das Informationsmanagement beeinflusst? Zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfragen wurde ein konzeptionelles Untersuchungsmodell entwickelt, welches mit Daten von 224 IT-Leitern evaluiert wurde. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen, dass Intrapreneurship die Umsetzung von eHealth-Anwendungen positiv beeinflussen kann. Die identifizierten Effekte waren jedoch vorwiegend indirekter Art, vermittelt durch den Professionalisierungsgrad des Informationsmanagements. So kann Intrapreneurship auf IT-Leiter-Ebene und auf Ebene der Gesamtorganisation zu einer Professionalisierung des strategischen Informationsmanagements führen. Auf Ebene der IT-Abteilung profitiert vor allem das operative Informationsmanagement von einer ausgeprägten Intrapreneurship-Kultur

Collaborative Innovation in Healthcare: Boundary Resources for Peripheral Actors

Realizing the potential of digital technologies in hospital care requires collaborative innovation among multiple actors both within and beyond hospitals. Our research investigates the question: what does it take to foster collaborative innovation within a traditionally siloed and closed health information infrastructure? Empirical findings are derived from three cases, which we analyze by focusing on how innovation relates to interfaces with hospitals’ information infrastructures. We draw on literature on digital platforms and innovation ecosystems and focus on the notion of boundary resources to characterize these innovation interfaces. While this notion has mainly addressed the concerns of platform owners for ‘securing’ and ‘resourcing’ their platforms, our analysis also points to resources related to peripheral actors’ needs, specifically ‘discovering’ and ‘vesting’ resources. Discovering resources assist innovators in making sense of possibilities and limitations, while vesting resources relate to value appropriation. These resources are crucial for collaborative innovation in existing hospital information infrastructures

How CIOs Influence Digital Transformation Success. Evidence from a Large-scale, Multi-national Survey

Digital transformation is an important and omnipresent topic for corporations that want to stay relevant and survive in today’s business environment. The success of digital transformation depends on a multitude of factors, one of which is digital transformation governance. This study investigates the moderating effect of CIO membership in the top management team on the relationship between enabling factors of digital transformation and digital transformation success. Furthermore, different digital transformation governance configurations are investigated regarding their effect on the success of digital transformation. We make use of a large scale, multi-national survey among manufacturing firms to answer these two research questions. With our study, we demonstrate the importance of including the CIO in the top management team to take advantage of existing resources and capabilities. Additionally, we show that firms with a CIO being responsible for digital transformation perform significantly better in their digital transformation endeavors

Feed the Machine - An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Openness in Innovation on IT Entrepreneurship

In the future, if businesses want to innovate, IT will have to play a substantial role. Furthermore, innovating with IT will most likely imply opening up the innovation channel and collaborating with various kinds of external partners, as digital platforms and eco-systems involving various actors arise. According to prior research, emphasizing external innovation collaboration bears the risk of inhibiting internal innovation. As the ability to innovate with IT becomes a key differ-ential factor in almost every industry, business managers – especially in non-IT firms – must cultivate the entrepreneurial role of their IT departments and the respective employees. There-fore, the question arises of how the focus on external innovation sources and the emphasis on internal innovativeness of IT professionals relate to each other. Prior research has generated conflicting results on this issue. With our large-scale (n = 354) empirical analysis, we provide evidence that firm openness fosters the entrepreneurial behavior of IT professionals. Further-more, this impact is mediated by the absorptive capacity of the IT unit. Consequently, as our model shows, valuable external knowledge can be integrated for internal innovation purposes, thus driving both IT professionals’ willingness to act entrepreneurially as well as their perceived ability to do so

AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF IS STRATEGY AND IS CONTRIBUTION TO FIRM PERFORMANCE

Given the important impact that an IS strategy has on the potential value IS brings to an organization, we develop and test a model of IS Strategy and Performance. Our survey-based study provides strong evidence that firms with defined IS strategies perform better than those without defined IS strategies. Our study also provides evidence that the two IS defined strategies -- IS Innovator and IS Conservative -- contribute in very different ways to firm performance: the IS Innovator strategy contributes to strategic growth whereas the IS Conservative strategy contributes to firm efficiency. Organizations without a clearly defined IS strategy experienced a negative contribution of IS to firm performance. The different types of performance had differing affects on satisfaction with the IS department and satisfaction with the CIO such that CIOs overseeing an Innovator strategy experience lower satisfaction from their organizations than do CIOs overseeing a Conservative strategy. The lowest performance and satisfaction levels were seen in firms with no IS strategy. Firms with no IS strategy should realize the negative outcomes of such a lack of strategy and work to extricate themselves before a consistent pattern of investing in IS without clear organizational benefit develops

An Integrated Lean Supply Chain Framework for U.S. Hospitals

We apply a lean supply chain framework to the healthcare industry in the U.S., drawing support from lean systems philosophy. We conceptualize a view of the U.S. healthcare ecosystem that places a hospital and its admitted patients at the center and describes how all entities inside and outside the hospital work can implement lean principles to improve patients\u27 quality care. This application depicts how a holistic consideration of hospital resources available in both the internal and external supply chain would increase the optimal use of such resources and ultimately serve patients. We offer propositions suggesting that an integrated supply chain perspective would be helpful for delivering high quality of care to patients admitted to the hospital. This perspective suggests that hospitals need to streamline the three types of flows– physical product, information and financial–with elements in the internal supply chain and maintain collaborative relations with entities in their external supply chain. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our research