How Digital is Social? Taking Advantage of Digital for Social Purposes

Today’s customers are highly aware of and sensitive to social topics. Thus, they expect organizations across all industries not only to avoid social inequalities but to react with distinct actions against social inequalities, i.e. to strive for social innovation. Moreover, digital technologies can help to leverage social innovation more easily. There are already first examples of incumbents fostering digital social innovation. Merck, for example, introduced a sticking plaster with sensors to support diabetes patients in analysing their intestinal fluids without injection. Although the potentials of digital technologies in addressing social issues seem to be obvious, research on digital social innovation is still in its infancy, and clear guidance on how to exploit the potential of digital social innovation is missing. As such, a common understanding in terms of theoretical and managerial implications is scarce. We propose a taxonomy in order to structure the research field and provide incumbents with a tool on how to address their social responsibility through digital social innovation. Thus, our study contributes to descriptive knowledge and delivers insights relevant to the practice of digital social innovation

Ex ante assessment of disruptive threats: Identifying relevant threats before one is disrupted

The shortening of product life-cycles accompanied by the rapid development of new products and dissolving industry boundaries are indicative of a multitude of potentially disruptive threats. The survival of incumbents depends on their capability to effectively anticipate and manage such threats. Thus, the early anticipation of disruptive threats to react or prepare for their impacts is a crucial topic in practice and academia. Although the current body of knowledge provides numerous approaches to disruption anticipation, a comprehensive conceptualisation of the evolution of disruptive threats is missing. Moreover, incumbents lack guidance on how to effectively anticipate disruptive threats. To address this gap, we propose the Disruption Evolution Framework (DEF), which conceptualises the course of disruptive threats along three phases (i.e. threat possible, apparent, and materialised) as well as distinguishes four interrelated categories of signals (i.e. context, catalyst, capability, and company signals) and threats (i.e. customer, competitor, product, and policy threats). Building on the DEF, we also propose the Disruptability Assessment Method (DAM), which enables incumbents to systematically assess disruptive threats via a step-by-step procedure. We evaluated the DAM in the Corporate Development and the Global Digital Partnerships departments of an insurance company. Overall, our work contributes to the descriptive and prescriptive knowledge on disruption anticipation