Transforming Digital Inventions into Digital Innovations – A Missing Material Perspective on Technology Adoption

Technology agnosticism dominates explanations of technology adoption in digital innovation. Accordingly, technology itself plays a limited role in determining adoption success. Instead, aspects outside the inventors' control, including marketing, user perceptions, and organizational environment, decide the adoption outcome. We revisit the original innovation concept and draw attention to what we call a digital invention. Looking at the transition of a digital invention to digital innovation, we argue for a technology-affinity perspective to complement existing adoption perspectives. The new perspective emphasizes the role of conscious invention design for innovation. We find three ways in which specific invention focus can increase the invention's chances for adoption. For instance, we show that contrary to the prevalent idea of technologies enabling new ways of doing things, it is the invention's focus on enabling innate behaviors that can facilitate adoption. Past innovation and contemporary innovation in the film industry illustrate our thinking

Page-Rewriting Digital Experiments – An Approach to Digital Field Experiments and a Demonstration in Carbon Offsetting

Field experiments are an integral part of the social sciences as they hold the promise of generalizable scientific findings. Yet, notwithstanding new opportunities brought upon by digital technologies, they are conducted seldomly, due to associated costs of alignment between industry and researchers. Against this background, we propose a new method for digital natural field experiments that offers an improved organizational and technical process for industry-academia alignment by limiting the requirement for the industry partners to change their systems for the experiment implementation. The method is demonstrated in a field setting, exploring the influence of carbon offsetting options on the purchasing behavior of consumers

One-click Application Deployment - An Approach for Automated Deployment of Instantiable Cross-platform Mobile Applications

Deployment of cross-platform mobile applications remains a task almost exclusively performed by application developers. Even with applications that are instantiated multiple times as stand-alone configured versions of a same application for different clients or purposes, the deployment requires organizations to allocate developers’ time and know-how to navigate the complex process of submitting application instances to different platforms. We extend the body of knowledge on cross-platform applications, which is currently dominated by literature covering aspects of application development, with a dedicated approach for cross-platform application deployment. Our approach enables non-technical roles in an organization to trigger a ‘one-click’ workflow for deploying instantiable cross-platform applications and applies to various scenarios in which stand-alone configurations of the same applications are required. The approach spurs academic inquiries into application deployment and has practical implications for organizations that want to streamline their application deployment, reduce required resources, and improve deployment efficiency

A Historical Perspective on Information Systems: A Tool and Methodology for Studying the Evolution of Social Representations on Wikipedia

In recent years, scholars’ interest in developing historically informed explanations of information systems has surged. Several scholars have suggested that doing so can help information systems scholars to examine shifts in the academic nature of our discipline, trace the origins of prominent information systems phenomena, and reflect on and critique their own work. To enable such inquiry, we draw on the theory of social representation to build an analytical tool, WikiGen, and develop a methodology for examining the evolution of collective knowledge on Wikipedia. We demonstrate the usefulness of the tool and methodology by applying it to an illustrative case study, the Wikipedia article on cloud computing. After presenting the results of the analysis, we discuss the applicability of the tool and methodology, the contributions of our study, and possibilities for future research

Design Principles for Digital Community Currencies

Community currencies are alternative currencies, which enable the mobilization of local resources for local needs and building resilient communities. They allow community members to perform economic transactions like buying products and paying for services using an alternative currency as a medium of exchange. For decades, regional, paper-based community currencies have been in use across the world. With the advent of the digital age, community currencies are increasingly moving into the digital space. Digital Community Currencies (DCCs) create opportunities for addressing challenges that traditional community currencies are facing, such as the inconvenience of handling two currencies in one wallet and the geographic limitation to a limited user population. This research builds upon characteristics and challenges of community currencies and derives six design principles from a literature review, an analysis of 16 community currency projects and an interview with a community currency project manager at the end of the project’s life. The design principles serve as a basis for establishing resilient and scalable DCCs. They contribute to the limited IS research on phenomena of social sustainability and have major practical implications when implemented in existing community currency systems

Integrating a Method for Achieving Activity-Oriented Sustainability into the Design Science Research Methodology

Sustainability increasingly becomes an effective argument in the public and academic discourse. However, in the scientific design process of IT artifacts, the notion of sustainability is often misused. IT artifacts and consequences resulting from their operation are characterized to be sustainable without truly reflecting the meaning of the characteristics of sustainability. By subscribing to a view of sustainability as a characteristic of an activity, we propose a method for the systematic integration of sustainability into the design of IT artifacts. Our so-called “activity-oriented sustainability method” is situated within the design science research methodology (DSRM) and allows to perform an ex-ante domain-specific sustainability analysis of activities, which are supported by an IT artifact. This article contributes to research and praxis by spurring discourse on the consideration of sustainability in design research endeavors and by providing a method for the systematic integration of sustainable activities into IT artifacts

The Genealogy of Knowledge: Introducing a tool and method for tracing the social construction of knowledge on Wikipedia

The study of the social construction of knowledge is an important topic in information systems. While the emergence of online social media platforms has brought about multiple new ways of knowledge co-creation by large groups of users, such processes are not yet well understood. We investigate how processes of knowledge co-creation can be studied in online platforms. We utilize data from Wikipedia to explore how knowledge is created and evolves over time. We draw on the theory of social representations (SRT), which views knowledge as a product of collective work carried out by social groups to make sense of their environments. We develop a method for studying social representations on Wikipedia that builds on WikiGen - an analytical tool - and qualitative analysis. Its usefulness is demonstrated with two illustrative case studies, the Cloud Computing and iPad Wikipedia articles. We contribute to IS a new tool and method for studying online knowledge co-creation processes

City 5.0

Citizens’ access to goods and services in the private sector is restricted, in some cases by affordability, in other by limited availability in some areas or at some times. Public services are subject to similar restrictions. Digital technologies can help in overcoming these restrictions and by doing so shift goods and services from the private sector into the public domain. For instance, a free public live screening of an opera performance that is usually restricted to a limited number of wealthy citizens is a new form of public services that is delivered in a new way. This article explains the notion of City 5.0, a symbolic metaphor for a liveable city in which the potential of digital technologies is used to eliminate citizens’ restrictions in consuming public goods and services

Technology Lifecycles and Digital Technologies: Patterns of Discourse across Levels of Materiality

The technology lifecycle model is extensively used to study technology evolution and innovation. However, this model was developed for industrial-age material technologies and does not address digital technologies with nonmaterial elements. Therefore, a question emerges as to whether the level of technological materiality is implicated in different dynamics of innovation, as reflected in the technology lifecycle. Digital technologies evolve through discourse that involves interactions among multiple stakeholders that shape the evolutionary trajectory of the technology. Therefore, we set out to examine whether discourse about digital technologies that vary in their level of materiality manifests in different ways throughout these technologies’ lifecycles. To do so, we conducted a study comparing the discourse around 10 digital technologies—five highly material and five highly nonmaterial—at different stages of their technology lifecycles. We identified three characteristics of discourse—volume, volatility, and diversity—and examined them for the 10 digital technologies by analyzing their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Our findings show that the discourse around technologies with different levels of materiality is similar in the initial era of the lifecycle but diverges in the two subsequent eras. In addition, we found that the discourse around highly nonmaterial technologies remains elevated for longer time periods, compared to highly material technologies. Based on these results, we put forth propositions that challenge and extend existing research on the relationships between the technological level of materiality, discourse, and trajectories of technology evolution

How SME Watkins Steel Transformed from Traditional Steel Fabrication to Digital Service Provision

There are many digital transformation success stories involving large enterprises, but few small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have explored and initiated their digital transformations. This article describes the large-scale digital transformation journey of Watkins Steel, an Australian medium-sized steel fabricator, to become a leading digital services provider. The case offers unique insights into how SMEs can apply two strategic digital transformation concepts-augmentation and adjacency- to reimagine their businesses, capitalizing on rich yet underexplored opportunities while not departing from their existing core business