A Case Study of Enterprise-wide Digital Innovation: Involving Non-IT Employees

Abstract

Today’s incumbent organisations are under pressure to proactively leverage their resources for digital innovation. Enterprise-wide initiatives hold potential in this regard by enabling employees across departments to contribute their knowledge, skills, and creativity towards digital innovation. However, IT units often struggle to transfer the ideas of non-IT employees into marketable digital solutions. Our understanding of how organisations coordinate and integrate employees’ contributions to digital innovation is limited, yet critical to their survival and growth. Taking a resource-based approach, we identify three complementary competences –orchestration, self-orchestration, and choreography– that support enterprise-wide digital innovation. Specifically, we report how these competences helped an incumbent organisation initiate digital innovation with its non-IT employees while making efficient use of its IT resources. Our study further shows that building these competences requires the strategic use of digital artefacts and their multiple roles in the innovation process