Digitalization and Innovation

Developments in digital technology offer new opportunities to design new products and services. However, creating such digitalized products and services often creates new problems and challenges to firms that are trying to innovate. In this essay, we analyze the impact of digitalization of products and services on innovations. In particular, we argue that digitalization of products will lead to an emergence of new layered product architecture. The layered architecture is characterized by its generative design rules that connect loosely coupled heterogeneous layers. It is pregnant with the potential of unbounded innovations. The new product architecture will require organizations to adopt a new organizing logic of innovation that we dubbed as doubly distributed innovation network. Based on this analysis, we propose five key issues that future researchers need to explore.innovation, innovation, product architecture, design rules

Evolving Epistemic Infrastructure: The Role of Scientific Journals in the Age of Generative AI

Scientific journals, crucial components of our epistemic infrastructure, have continuously adapted to the changing technological landscape. Today, we stand at the precipice of a transformative phase brought about by generative AI, specifically large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Bard. In this opinion piece, I examine the implications of these models for the future of scientific journals and various stakeholders in the scientific community, including journals, scholars, and universities. To envisage the future trajectory of scientific journals, it’s imperative to comprehend the operational mechanisms of these models and the fundamentally recombinatorial nature of human knowledge creation. I suggest that one of the significant roles generative AI can play is facilitating “long jumps” in our knowledge exploration process. I further propose decentralization and deferred and temporary binding as two crucial characteristics of the evolving epistemic infrastructure that supports precarious knowledge production. I foresee a future where scientific journals extend beyond their traditional gatekeeping roles. I call for scholars—as authors, reviewers, and mentors—to utilize these technologies to traverse the broad landscape of potential knowledge, fostering a more inclusive and dynamic scientific ecosystem

The Tables Have Turned: How Can the Information Systems Field Contribute to Technology and Innovation Management Research?

Pervasive digitalization has brought new disruptive changes in the economy. At the core of these disruptive changes is digitally enabled generativity. In this paper, I argue that scholars must offer new theoretical models and insights that guide management practices in the age of generativity that can extend, or perhaps supplant, the prevailing emphasis on modularity. To that end, I suggest that information systems scholars must attend explicitly to the generative materiality of digital artifacts by drawing on the sociomaterial perspective, which has emerged as a robust intellectual tradition of the IS community. This paper is a provocation for those IS scholars who are willing to stretch the boundaries of their intellectual imagination beyond the comfort of IS journals and conferences, and offers a promising path forward

Dynamic Nature of Trust in Virtual Teams

Building on the theory of swift trust, we empirically examine the dynamic nature of trust and its changing patterns in both cognitive and affective elements between high- and low-performing teams over time (early, middle, and late stages of project). Using data from 38, four-person student teams from six universities competing in a web-based business simulation game over eight-week periods, we found that both high- and low-performing teams started with similar levels of trust in both cognitive and affective dimensions. However, high-performing teams were better at developing and maintaining the trust level throughout the project life. Moreover, virtual teams relied more on a cognitive than an affective element of trust. These findings provide a preliminary step toward understanding the dynamic nature and relative importance of cognition- and affect-based trust over time

The Next Wave of Nomadic Computing: A Research Agenda for Information Systems Research

A nomadic information environment is a heterogeneous assemblage of interconnected technological and organizational elements, which enables physical and social mobility of computing and communication services between organizational actors both within and across organizational borders. We analyze such environments based on their prevalent features of mobility, digital convergence, and mass scale. We describe essential features of each in more detail and characterize their mutual interdependencies. We build a framework, which identifies research issues in nomadic information environments at the individual, the team, the organizational, and inter-organizational levels, comprising both service and infrastructure development. We assess the opportunities and challenges for research into each area at the level of design, use and adoption, and impacts. We conclude by discussing challenges posed by nomadic information environments for information systems field to our research skills and methods. These deal with the need to invent novel research methods and shift research focus, the necessity to question the divide between the technical and the social, and the need to better integrate developmental and behavioral (empirical) research modes

Electronic Mail Usage Pattern of Emergent Leaders in Distributed Teams

We conducted an exploratory study to examine the unique electronic mail usage patterns exhibited by the emergent leaders in seven teams of senior executives of a federal government agency. The team members worked together over ten weeks via electronic mail in the context of an executive development program. The goal of the analysis was to identify the distinct patterns of communication behaviors among emergent leaders in distributed teams that differentiate them from other team members. To this end, we conducted a content analysis of 327 electronic mail messages that were sent to the list-serve, using a coding scheme developed based on the existing leadership and small group literature. We examined the communication frequency, the message type (task-oriented, people-oriented, and technology-oriented), and the message length. Our results provide four main observations regarding emergent leadership in distributed teams: (1) overall, the emergent leaders sent more messages than other members did; (2) the emergent leaders sent more task-related messages than other members did; (3) the emergent leaders sent longer messages than other members did; and (4) demographic variables such as age, job experience, and experience at the current position did not affect emergent leadership

Hyperbolic Organizational Identity and Identity of Digital Artifacts: A Comparative Study of Healthcare Innovations

As digital technologies move toward the core of an organization’s offerings, the identity of many contemporary organizations is now born in association with the digital technology that characterizes them. Entrepreneurs largely rely on setting up high expectations to attract initial resources to materialize the idea for their digital innovation. However, such a tactic may be problematic when their eventual digital artifact contradicts their core organizational identity, leading to their legitimacy loss. In this ongoing study, we explore a novel phenomenon of hyperbolic organizational identity. Drawing on longitudinal archival sources, we conduct a comparative case study of IBM Watson and DeepMind, whose identities both became hyperbolic, yet experienced different outcomes in their healthcare innovations. From our findings to date, a preliminary dialectical process model is presented that depicts the interplay between organizational and technical identities of the digital artifact in leading to the formation and change in hyperbolic organizational identity