Refining Design Principles for Value-Sensitive Digital Social Innovation to Support Homeless Neighbors

Homelessness is a major global challenge. It can have a negative impact on people’s social, physical, and psychological well-being, which makes those experiencing homelessness a particularly vulnerable group in society. Digital social innovations (DSIs) try to address social issues such as homelessness with the help of digital solutions. Since homeless neighbors are vulnerable, DSIs need to be designed and developed to fit their values and needs. Prior research has contributed design principles (DPs) to be acted upon for the creation of value-sensitive DSIs. However, these DPs have only been abstracted based on one action design research project, implicating a low projectability level. By analyzing these DPs’ fitness within currently available DSI applications to support homeless neighbors, we further codify, generalize, and refine them, inducing higher projectability. Researchers and practitioners can draw on our refined DPs to better understand value-sensitive DSI projects and simultaneously use this knowledge for instantiations

Towards Phenomenon-driven Design Science Research

We propose a research approach that extends phenomenon-driven research – which is primarily aimed at producing descriptive and explanatory knowledge about novel phenomena – with a design-oriented focus. The resulting approach aims to develop not only explanatory knowledge about novel phenomena but also prescriptive knowledge about how to face corresponding novel challenges and does so in conjunction and in a mutually reinforcing way. We illustrate our approach with two examples to understand and produce design principles for the novel phenomena of organising the IT setups in Scaled Agile organisations and Digital Innovation Units, respectively. Researchers can draw on our approach to understand novel phenomena and simultaneously produce knowledge that is also relevant to practitioners facing novel practical challenges resulting from these novel phenomena

‘Forewarned is Forearmed’: Overcoming Multifaceted Challenges of Digital Innovation Units

Due to rapidly changing customer needs, enterprises seek to innovate continuously. Incumbent firms need to improve their capabilities to develop, evaluate, and implement digital innovations. Recently, many enterprises established digital innovation units (DIUs) for accelerating their digital innovation endeavors. Although numerous units exist in practice, the number of negative press headlines that address failure or dissolution of DIUs is increasing. Based on a literature review and a qualitative cross-industry study with eleven enterprises, we discuss the relation of DIUs to organizational concepts like ambidexterity, bimodal, and trimodal IT. Furthermore, we substantiated seven multifaceted challenges of DIUs, which span across stages of innovation development, organizational units, and hierarchical levels. Based on these findings, we developed three recommendations for responses to these challenges: (1) DIU-Business-IT collaboration across stages, (2) network of executive responsibilities, and (3) general digital awareness of the organization as a whole

THE DIGITAL INNOVATION UNIT: A SILVER BULLET FOR MANAGING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

We propose an agenda for further research on digital innovation units (DIUs) that refines the current –mainly descriptive– body of knowledge. Receiving great attention in research as well as in practice, DIUs are dedicated organizational units whose role is to drive and support digital transformation by promoting diverse facets of digital innovation. Utilizing DIU knowledge from a theoretical literature review on DIUs and their role in digital transformation, the resulting research agenda assists in structuring the field by synthesizing and connecting the partly isolated knowledge chunks with each other. We illustrate a coherent picture towards theorizing DIUs using Whetten’s building blocks of theory. Researchers can draw on our core findings to understand the emerging phenomenon of DIUs and to use them as a stencil for conducting proper future DIU research. It simultaneously may guide practitioners to understand the nature of DIUs and their role in a firm’s digital transformation journey

Towards an Intra- and Interorganizational Perspective: Objectives and Areas of Activity of Digital Innovation Units

Incumbent firms increasingly strive to embrace digital innovation, often via implementing dedicated digital innovation units (DIUs). As seizing the rapid and various digital innovation-related market movements may be overwhelming for an individual DIU, collaborations within ecosystems are perceived as crucial for continuously recognizing business opportunities and threats. Although this is a growing field of interest in recent research, insights into the objectives of DIUs and the consequent activities for effectively handling digital innovation are yet scarce. We address this issue by synthesizing 28 cases on DIUs through a qualitative meta-analysis. The analysis revealed that while DIUs enforce an intraorganizational cultural and overarching organizational design change, they also impose an interorganizational perspective with customer-oriented digital expertise and innovation, as well as cultivation of digital innovation ecosystems. Thus, we contribute to the existing DIU research by clarifying these objectives and extending them to achieve a conscious interorganizational perspective with accompanying activities

The Unfolding of Digital Transformation in Pre-Digital Companies: A Meta-Case Analysis

Due to the growing dispersion of digital technology, many organizations engage in digital transformation. While digital transformation case studies have increased in the information systems and management domain, different ways in which digital transformation unfolds have been proposed. We perform a qualitative meta-analysis of case studies on digital transformation initiatives. From this analysis, we develop two core narratives (a dialectical and a teleological narrative) that we explain in-depth and derive two research avenues from our analysis. Thus, we are advancing the discussion on the unfolding of digital transformation by 1) summarizing existing case studies into two core narratives and 2) shifting the discussion from an explorative character towards a more explanatory approach to better understand how digital transformation unfolds within pre-digital organizations

Towards a Foundational and Extensional Dynamic Capability Perspective on Digital Innovation Units

Digital innovations are fundamentally transforming incumbent firms. Accordingly, many firms established dedicated agile units that focus on digital innovation: digital innovation units (DIUs). DIUs assist incumbents –in addition to other tasks– in identifying digital trends that could harm day-to-day business. Despite recent publications about objectives or structures of DIUs, little attention is given to their dynamic capabilities (DynCaps). Based on a structured literature review on DynCaps, digital innovation, and agility in organizations, our illustration of the Dynamic Capability Jungle provides a structured overview of DynCaps and their interrelationships as well as assists in classifying the plethora of different definitions. We identified foundational and extensional DynCaps needed in or realized within different setups of DIUs. We contribute to research by connecting DynCap research to the nascent DIU research stream. Our Dynamic Capability Jungle may assist in overcoming and tackling multifaceted and sometimes competing concerns while establishing DIUs

Realizing Organizational Ambidexterity: A Taxonomy of Digital Accelerators and Their Integration Mechanisms for Digital Innovation

The innovator’s dilemma leads organizations to follow exploration and exploitation activities while simultaneously striving for ambidexterity. Whereas structures, modes, or conditions of ambidexterity have received much attention in recent studies, research on how the integration of digital innovation is achieved is still scarce. This capability is often ascribed to digital innovation units (DIUs), which are responsible for the development and integration of digital innovations. Within the scope of our qualitative-empirical study, we discovered how the integration of digital innovation is potentially covered by digital accelerators, an instance of digital innovation units. A categorization of digital accelerators and their integration mechanisms is achieved through a taxonomy. We propose that digital accelerators act as middleware between the frontend and backend of innovation activities. Especially, participation in digital innovation ecosystems and external validation create a meaningful support for realizing organizational ambidexterity with digital accelerators

The Status Quo of Digital Innovation Units: “A Day Late and a Dollar Short”

This paper examines digital innovation (DI) types and digital trends that are especially addressed within digital innovation units (DIU). As research on DIUs is still scarce, we collected website data from German DAX30 incumbents to identify dependencies between different DIU setups, DI types and digital trends. Not surprisingly, our results show that DIUs primarily focus on digital products and business models related to AI, IoT/Smart x and Data Analytics. Differentiating between four DIU setups, we could not find particular digital trends being addressed by specific setups. In addition, drawing on the Gartner Hype Cycle (GHC), we show that DIUs mostly pay attention to digital trends in more mature stages. We conclude and recommend the need for DIUs to focus on radical DIs to be as innovative as they should be and to pay attention on digital trends in the earlier stages of the GHC to promote radical DIs