Shifting Design Capability to Third-Party Developers: An affordance Perspective on Platform Boundary Resources

Boundary resource theory has emerged as conceptual tool for understanding the complex relationship between platform owners and third-party developers. Drawing on existing theories of boundary objects and boundary spanning competence it suggests that platforms offer influence over external ecosystems, yet keeps it at arm’s length. To exercise such governance, however, platform owners have to figure out how to design boundary resource to transfer design capability to third-party developers. Addressing this challenge, we analyze a digital platform initiative in the automotive industry from an affordances perspective. By doing so, we have explore what platform boundary resources allow developers to achieve, rather than what they are. As a main obstacle in the transfer of design capability, we found that platform owners’ perceptions of what a specific boundary resource affords often differ from third-party developers understanding of the same resource

Digitized Products: Challenges and Practices from the Creative Industries

Recent digital technologies like the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality have brought IT into companies’ core products. What were previously purely physical products are becoming hybrid or digitized. Despite receiving a lot of recent attention, digitized products have only seen a slow uptake in businesses so far. In this paper, we study the challenges that keep companies from realizing the desired impacts of digitized products and the practices they employ to address these challenges. To do so, we looked at companies from a set of industries that are highly affected by digital transformation, but at the same time hesitant to move to a more digitized world: the creative industries. Based on a literature review and twelve interviews in creative industries, we developed a conceptual model that can serve as a basis for formulating testable hypotheses for further research in this area

Digital Innovation Management and Path Dependence: An Integrated Perspective of Manufacturing Incumbents

Is digital innovation a big chance or a big threat for physical product-centric incumbents? Building on the unique characteristics of digital innovation, new market players can break the dominance of incumbents by providing digitally enabled products with distinct characteristics. Therefore, this paper empirically explores the dynamics within incumbents related to digital innovation management. Qualitative methods are used to systematically and inductively gain insights into how digital innovation is considered in the context of incumbents with physical product-driven business models. We use path dependence theory to explain the findings and support theoretical generalization of our results. The study contributes to the literature on digital innovation, how incumbents manage digital innovation under certain circumstances, and the related impacts on their business model. Further, we suggest three stages of digital innovation management in the context of path dependence

ENABLING DIGITAL INNOVATION IN PRODUCT-CENTRIC FIRMS THROUGH MICROFOUNDATIONS

Digital innovation poses a threat for incumbent product-centric firms as digitalization blurs industry boundaries and lowers entry barriers to new entrants. However, digital innovation offers many opportunities for incumbents to sustain and successfully compete in the new digital space, if they can overcome the challenges associated with the development and adoption of digital innovation practices. This study empirically explores how incumbent product-centric firms based in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria master the challenge of digital innovation by looking for specific microfoundations through the lens of the dynamic capabilities framework. The grounded theory method is used to get a subjective view of practitioners. The study’s contribution is two-fold. Firstly, it addresses criticism related to the practical application of the dynamic capabilities framework by providing a detailed view on specific underlying microfoundations. Secondly, it aims at expanding our understanding of how digital innovation evolves by providing key microfoundations deemed important by practice for the development of digital innovation among product-centric firms

Evolving the Modular Layered Architecture in Digital Innovation: The Case of the Car’s Instrument Cluster

Digital innovation entails the combining of digital and physical components to produce novel products. The materiality of digital artifacts, particularly the separation between their material and immaterial features, which is expressed through a layered architecture, lays the foundation for the generative potential of digital innovation. Gaining an understanding of the work involved in creating such a layered architecture and tracing the shifts in the material sub-stratum as physical products are digitalized provides insight into the organizational implications of digital innovation. To this end, we study the digitalization of the automobile by focusing on the evolution of a car manufacturer’s instrument cluster or Driver Information Module (DIM) from 2005 onwards. Based on laddering interviews with 20 people involved in the development of three increasingly digitized DIMs, this paper traces the progressive dissociation between the material and non-material aspects of digitalized artifacts and the organizational implications of evolving a modular layered architecture

The Generative Capacity of Digital Artifacts: A Mapping of the Field

The concept of generativity as the capacity of a technology or a system to be malleable by diverse groups of actors in unanticipated ways has recently gained considerable traction in information systems research. We review a sample of the body of knowledge and identify that scholars commonly investigated generativity in conjunction with digital infrastructures and digital platforms, both of which are complex, networked, and evolving socio-technical systems. Interestingly, other types of digital artifacts have been neglected, despite our initial assumption that the distinct attributes (e.g., reprogrammability, distributedness) of any digital artifact match well with generativity. The literature review also reveals that innovation brought about heterogeneous groups of actors is universally regarded as the goal of generativity, discounting the possibility of exploiting generative systems towards other valuable ends such as organizational agility. Furthermore, scholars commonly discuss generativity in conjunction with the logic of modularity, leading to unresolved questions on how these two concepts might complement each other. Another important contribution of this paper is the systematization of various meanings of generativity, spanning from the philosophical–e.g., generative mechanisms in critical realist research–to a more literal understanding, for instance generativity as synonym to ‘creation of a particular solution’

Sociomaterial Quasi-objects: From Interface to Experience

In this paper, I examine design practices by contrasting the Cartesian view of separation with an ontological perspective and argue for a dynamic, multiple, and entangled world (namely, sociomateriality). In the digital era we live in, sociomateriality helps move design practices forward in order to embrace constant changes and re- configurations. The word interface manifests a worldview of separation. Researchers typically conceive an interface as belonging to an artifact; that is, the technology, the material. More so, [people] typically considers user interfaces as the layer that separates and connects the technology and the user, which enables interaction. I recognize the limitations of the well-established perspective of interface design and contrast two traditional HCI concepts (namely, usability and context) from a Cartesian versus a sociomaterial perspective. However, to embrace and capitalize on the emergent digital reality, we need a new vocabulary. I introduce helpful concepts that one can use when designing and talking about experiences, and I ground the concepts in a sociomaterial ontological perspective. The concepts and design approach presented in this paper invite and encourage researchers to focus on experiences as sociomaterial entanglements and re-configurations and not as separated social and material entities. By using Michel Serres’ (1980) term quasi-objects, I call attention to the complexity of sociomaterial entanglements that make up experiences and emphasize a holistic and inclusive design approach. In addition, introducing sociomaterial concepts, such as agential cuts and intra-actions, into the human-computer interaction domain invites researchers to think and act in new ways in the era of digitalized experiences. I examine the benefits of the sociomaterial design approach and present practical guidelines on how to approach experiential design with a sociomaterial take

A Balanced Perspective on the Bright and Dark Sides of IT Based on a Systems Theory of IT Innovation, Adoption, and Adaptation

This conceptual contribution explains how a systems theory of IT innovation, adoption, and adaptation provides a balanced perspective on the bright and dark sides of IT. It starts by explaining how the bright and dark sides of IT are often entangled, which implies that variance theories in the style of TAM and UTAUT should have difficulty addressing the bright and the dark in a balanced and useful way. It distinguishes systems theories from variance theories. It proposes an extension of work system theory (WST) in the form of a systems theory of IT innovation, adoption, and adaptation that provides a balanced perspective on the bright and dark sides of IT. It shows how that theory, combined with WST and some of its other extensions, leads to a series of topics and questions that are directly relevant to understanding and analyzing the bright and dark sides of IT

Digital Innovation and Organizational Culture: The Case of a Danish Media Company

In this study, we investigate the relationship between organizational culture and digital innovation, with a particular focus on understanding firms’ abilities to achieve a balance between stability and flexibility. On the background of an in-depth case study of the development of a digital news service in one of the largest media companies in Denmark, we rely on the widely used Competing Values Framework and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument to identify the dominant organizational culture as a basis for understanding the challenges of transforming the company by using digital technology to innovate existing product and service offerings. Our study shows that the digital news service and the emerging work practices associated with it were negatively influenced by an imbalance towards the control-oriented dominant culture of the company, leading to limited heterogeneity within the innovation network and the digital innovation processes. The article contributes to the body of knowledge on digital innovation by investigating how organizational culture influence a firm’s ability to engage in digital innovation. Implications for both practitioners and researchers are discusse