Understanding Barriers to Internal Startups in Large Organizations: Evidence from a Globally Distributed Company

Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers, executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning, unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol, we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for internal startups in large global companies.acceptedVersio

Examining the concept of temporality in Information System Development Flow

Awareness and use of flow methods is rapidly growing across the information systems development (ISD) community. The differentiating feature of flow methods is their speed, epitomised by terms such as lead-time, cycle time, cost of delay, and velocity. Despite this, ISD research adopts an overly simplistic, ‘clock’ interpretation of time, ignoring the complex, multi-faceted, subtle and socially-embedded nature of temporality. This research applies temporality theory to examine ISD flow in two teams, examining concepts such as event time, synchronisation, and temporal perception and personality. It contributes to research and practice by (i) identifying the temporal characteristics of flow practices, (ii) identifying temporal challenges of flow practices, (iii) developing an extensive roadmap for future research to address the current dearth of solutions in existing literature. While this study examines flow methods, lessons learned can then be tailored and applied to other ISD contexts