Cascading Digital Options and the Evolution of Digital Infrastructures: The Case of IIoT

Digital infrastructures provide a space where possibilities for innovation continuously emerge. They are not stable entities but are evolving. Their boundaries are subject to constant negotiation among multiple organizational actors as well as changing connections of digital technologies, operations, and users. In this paper, we explore the evolution of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructure in a leading manufacturing company. We find that the IIoT infrastructure provided actionable spaces upon which organizational actors discovered opportunities for improving process performance which, in turn, led to investment decisions. We explain this process through the lens of digital options theory and highlight how IIoT infrastructure provides the material foundation for the identification of digital options, how the realization of digital options leads to the emergence of more digital options, and how these “cascading” digital options are implicated in the evolution of IIoT infrastructure. We discuss theoretical and practical implications

THE CURRENT STATE AND FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES OF DIGITAL INNOVATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Digital innovation has already disrupted numerous industries and is challenging extant theories about innovation. However, until now there is no comprehensive review that systemizes the current state of knowledge on digital innovation. Since publication rates on digital innovation increased fivefold since 2015, it is especially important to understand how the field is developing. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on how the field has developed, identify under-researched topics and under-used methods to guide future research. In our structured literature review, we systemize the findings by dif-ferentiating between two dimensions - digital innovation as a process and as an outcome. Furthermore, we explore determinants of digital innovation by taking three different levels of analysis into consider-ation: individual, organizational and environmental. By including extant research until today, we pro-vide a comprehensive summary on current knowledge on digital innovation and identify opportunities for future research

A WORK MODEL FOR EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN INNOVATION IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS

Digitization offers employees the opportunity to take part in the innovation development processes within organizations. Although employees’ integration as innovators offers promising opportunities, the topic has been fairly neglected both in research and practice. Organizations could take a step in this direction by following examples such as Google’s ‘Innovation Time Off’, where employees are temporarily released from their ordinary work to generate new ideas. Although organizations of various backgrounds should be able to reap benefits of such work models, implementation might fail due to an organizational culture built on hierarchical structures and rigid processes. Especially in public organizations, little is known about the successful implementations of such work models. In particular, research on drivers and barriers of such work models is scarce. Using the socio-technical systems model as a guiding lens, our case study shows that implementation success in public organizations increases with the existence of four aspects: 1) innovation time to foster innovative mind-sets, 2) innovation champions who move beyond the confines of their assigned work, 3) a digital innovation platform enabling an internal crowdsourcing community, 4) an innovation culture leading to beneficial changes in organizational structure

Governing Digital Innovation: Exploring the Role of Chief Digital Officers

The digitization has disrupted industries and challenged incumbent organizations. To profit from the distinct characteristics of digital technology and to enhance digital innovation success, organizations have introduced mechanisms to access knowledge sources residing within and outside the organization. At the same time, new managerial positions, such as the Chief Digital Officer (CDO), have been established to organize the adoption of new technologies and champion digital innovation. We explore how CDOs govern organization’s digital innovation success by assuming the role of an innovation champion. Moreover, we propose that internal reorganization and sourcing of external knowledge offer important mechanisms for CDOs to enhance organization’s absorptive capacity, and indirectly digital innovation success. We plan to test the proposed research model empirically by performing a regression analysis of multivariate longitudinal data of the world’s largest manufacturers

Championing Digital Innovation Success: The Role of CDOs

The disruptive nature of digital innovation has led incumbent organizations to face enormous challenges and pressure. To address the fundamentally new nature of digital innovations, incumbents have established new managerial roles, such as Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), to champion innovation. We explore the role these innovation champions play for digital innovation success and argue that internal reorganization and the sourcing of external knowledge constitute important mechanisms through which CDOs might contribute to organizations’ digital innovation success. We will empirically test our proposed research model using longitudinal data on the world’s largest companies. Our study is expected to contribute to literature on knowledge recombination and innovation management by examining how innovation champions at the C-level use internal reorganization and sourcing of external knowledge to enhance digital innovation success

Digital Infrastructure Evolution: A Digital Trace Data Study

Digital infrastructures are socio-technical arrangements of physical objects, digital technologies, users, and processes. They constantly evolve and provide the foundation for the emergence and implementation of a variety of applications. But how and why do digital infrastructures evolve? In this short paper, we report on an ongoing study of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) system by drawing on digital trace data about the system’s development process and using code complexity analysis. We present interaction patterns between the development of a digital infrastructure’s core services on the one hand and the development of specific applications on the other. Based on these patterns, we point to several puzzles that we identify around digital infrastructure evolution

The Changing Roles of Innovation Actors and Organizational Antecedents in the Digital Age

Despite being acknowledged for playing a pivotal role in facilitating innovations in the digital age, there is a lack of research on the multifaceted role of digital innovation actors. This paper provides a systematic, multi-disciplinary literature review on innovation actors in a digital and non-digital context. Based on a search of 149 high-quality journals and conference proceedings, we identified 110 articles as relevant and categorized as well as synthesized the knowledge on innovation actors’ role and organizational antecedents in a digital and non-digital context. We find an increasing focus on innovation actors’ role in user communities in a digital context. Moreover, literature on organizational antecedents puts a stronger emphasis on allocating resources to innovation actors outside the organization. By analyzing extant research we provide a comprehensive summary on current knowledge and outline opportunities for future research on digital innovation actors

AI GOVERNANCE: ARE CHIEF AI OFFICERS AND AI RISK OFFICERS NEEDED?

While AI provides many business opportunities across industries, the organizational implications of AI are still largely unclear. We investigate governance roles related to AI use in practice, and undertake first steps to define the role profiles of a Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and an AI Risk Officer (AIRO). We base our inquiry on two sources: a literature review and evaluative interviews with nine AI professionals from small- and medium-sized companies. We find that, whereas the roles and activities associated with the CAIO and AIRO are commonly deemed relevant for such companies in the long run, today only a few companies have implemented them. Especially the creation of the CAIO position seems justified, due to the complexity of AI and the need for extensive interaction and coordination related to AI governance

Enabling Innovation Champions in Organizations - Results of a Systematic Literature Analysis

Based on a systematic literature analysis, this paper takes stock of the current landscape of research on innovation champions from an individual and organizational perspective: 149 journals and conference proceedings were examined on the topic of innovation champions. 85 articles were identified as relevant and systematically categorized according to two perspectives by synthesizing enablers of innovation champions on the individual (e.g. skills) and organizational level (e.g. knowledge management). While our analysis illuminates a high variety of enablers that influence innovation champions, the descriptive findings show a stronger focus of innovation champion studies on individual level enablers. Our literature review points out the lack of research on negative individual characteristics (e.g. narcissism), on the innovation champion in the IS context and on formalized groups of innovation champions (e.g. organizational units)

At the Crossroads between Digital Innovation and Digital Transformation

Consumerization, democratization, and platform business logics are not only creating opportunities for new product development, new business models, and new ways of organizing, but in addition are also driving the transformation of established organizational resources and routines. This PDW is designed to address questions at the intersection of digital innovation and digital transformation. These topics are interrelated as successive waves of digital innovation within an industry or at the level of an individual firm and its ecosystem may lead to fundamental transformation of structures, roles and management, culture, competencies and skills, and so forth, depending on the influence of barriers such as inertia and resistance to change. By exploring how and why the new organizing logic of digital innovation impacts and transforms incumbent firms, the workshop addresses questions from four different areas: (1) Why the new logic of digital innovation triggers a digital transformation in incumbent firms; (2) the drivers of this digital transformation in incumbent firms’ immediate environment; (3) how these drivers may under certain conditions alter the structure, strategy, culture, competencies, skills and technology platforms of incumbent firms; (4) the trajectories of digital transformation journeys inside incumbent firms