Reflections on digital innovation

The paper by Henfridsson et al. opens up a new agenda for IS research on the content and process of digital innovation. The crucial element in their perspective is the role of recombination in innovation. They supplement an emphasis on design recombination with a symmetrical emphasis on use recombination. While supporting Henfridsson et al.'s overall argument, I point out how central parts overlap with and are extended in disciplines outside IS research.     

Recombination in the open-ended value landscape of digital innovation

Digital innovation introduces a new open-ended value landscape to anyone seeking to generate or capture new value. To understand this landscape, we distinguish between design recombination and use recombination, explore how they play out together, and redirect the attention from products and services toward digital resources. Digital resources serve as building-blocks in digital innovation, and they hold the potential to simultaneously be part of multiple value paths, offered through design recombination and assembled through use recombination. Building on this perspective, we offer the value spaces framework as a tool for better understanding value creation and capture in digital innovation. We illustrate the framework and offer the early contours of a research agenda for information systems researchers.     

Business Model Innovation for Sustainability: Towards a Unified Perspective for Creation of Sustainable Business Models

Business model innovation has seen a recent surge in academic research and business practice. Changes to business models are recognized as a fundamental approach to realize innovations for sustainability. However, little is known about the successful adoption of sustainable business models (SBMs). The purpose of this paper is to develop a unified theoretical perspective for understanding business model innovations that lead to better organizational economic, environmental and social performance. The paper examines bodies of literature on business model innovation, sustainability innovation, networks theory, stakeholder theory and product–service systems. We develop five propositions that support the creation of SBMs in a unified perspective, which lays a foundation to support organizations in investigating and experimenting with alternative new business models. This article contributes to the emerging field of SBMs, which embed economic, environmental and social flows of value that are created, delivered and captured in a value network. It highlights gaps for addressing the challenges of business model innovation for sustainability and suggests avenues for future research. © 2017 The Authors. Business Strategy and the Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd     

Digital innovation and transformation: An institutional perspective

In this conceptual piece we suggest that the institutional perspective is a prolific lens to study digital innovation and transformation. Digital innovation is about the creation and putting into action of novel products and services; by digital transformation we mean the combined effects of several digital innovations bringing about novel actors (and actor constellations), structures, practices, values, and beliefs that change, threaten, replace or complement existing rules of the game within organizations and fields. We identify three types of novel institutional arrangements critical for digital transformation: digital organizational forms, digital institutional infrastructures, and digital institutional building blocks. From this vantage point, an institutional perspective invites us to examine how these novel arrangements gain social approval (i.e. legitimacy) in the eyes of critical stakeholders and their interplay with existing institutional arrangements. Questioning the disruptive talk associated with digital transformation, we draw on the institutional change literature to illustrate the institutionalization challenges and that existing institutional arrangements are pivotal arbiters in deciding whether and how novel arrangements gain acceptance. We close this essay with discussing the implications of an institutional perspective on digital transformation for policy, practice and research.     

Stakeholder Governance for Responsible Innovation: A Theory of Value Creation,Appropriation, and Distribution

In the face of intractable societal grand challenges, organizations increasingly resort to responsible innovation – that is, they pledge to create value for multiple stakeholders through developing new products or services that avoid doing harm and improve conditions for people and the planet. While the link between responsible innovation and societal improvements has been established, organizations pursuing responsible innovation lack governance mechanisms to guide the allocation of the value created – both economic and social – among heterogeneous stakeholders, in line with their responsible intent. We combine the value-based strategy and stakeholder perspectives and infuse a deliberative process to design a three-stage model of value allocation that rests on three key organizational decisions: i) what value to create and for whom, ii) how to appropriate the value created vis-à-vis unintended value appropriators, and iii) how to distribute the value appropriated among intended stakeholders. We propose a framework of stakeholder governance comprised of four novel mechanisms by which organizations can allocate value among their multiple principal stakeholders as part of participative processes. Our study contributes to responsible innovation and corporate governance research by unpacking how new value is managed to solve societal grand challenges.     

Future directions for scholarship on data governance,digital innovation,and grand challenges

This introduction to the special issue on Data Governance, Digital Innovation, and Grand Challenges highlights the importance of data governance when seeking to address grand challenges through the innovative use of digital technologies. The benefits, risks, and consequences of data, ubiquitous in today's data-rich world, can be harnessed for innovation and societal good. However, there are no guarantees that (only) desirable outcomes will develop. The creation and exploitation of vast data stockpiles raise substantial concerns about privacy, data security, equity, and the potential for harm from data misuse. Meaningful approaches to data governance within and across organizations are critically important to facilitate digital innovation and to balance social, economic and technical benefits and risks for individuals, organizations, and societies. In this introductory paper, we reflect on foundations established to date in information systems (IS) research and highlight possible future directions for scholarship on data governance across multiple levels to enhance digital innovations for transformation and societal good.     

Overcoming resource challenges in peer-production communities through bricolage: The case of HomeNets

Peer-production communities can create great value and foster innovation for their members, even in situations where resources are extremely scarce. How these communities create or acquire necessary resources in such settings is an important theoretical and practical question. In this paper, I investigate how a peer-production community overcame substantial resource challenges, using the analytic lens of bricolage theory, in a longitudinal study of HomeNets, communities of residents that developed residential Internet infrastructures and services for a million users in Minsk, Belarus, without funds, material resources, knowledge, or formal legal status. The findings illustrate that communities develop their missing resources by engaging in multiple coexisting bricolage forms and processes, which help them to successfully incorporate the individual and collective resource building efforts of their participants and address the challenges specific to the continuously evolving community. Based on the findings, I propose a model of community resource development with bricolage, discuss theoretical and practical implications for studies on communities and bricolage, and suggest areas for further research.     

Internal Embeddedness,Headquarters Involvement,and Innovation Importance in Multinational Enterprises

In this paper we apply a business network perspective to investigate the effects of internal embeddedness and headquarters involvement on subsidiaries' innovation‐related competencies, and on the perceived importance of innovation in multinational enterprises. A model framed in the innovation context is developed and six hypotheses are tested on 85 innovation projects in 23 multinational enterprises using partial least squares based structural equation modelling. The results suggest that, contrary to predictions of the business network perspective, headquarters involvement in the innovation development process improves subsidiary competencies while internal embeddedness does not. Headquarters involvement, driven by subsidiary internal embeddedness, enhances the innovation impact on the subsidiary, which in turn influences innovation importance at corporate level. Thus, the business network perspective is challenged but at the same time expanded in terms of highlighting the role of, and interplay between, different internal corporate actors, particularly the role of headquarters, in developing competencies and creating competitive advantage.     

Inferring strategies from observed actions: a nonparametric, binary tree classification approach

This paper introduces a non-parametric binary classification tree approach to inferring unobserved strategies from the observed actions of economic agents. The strategies are in the form of possibly nested if–then statements. We apply our approach to experimental data from the repeated ultimatum game, which was conducted in four different countries by Roth et al. (Am. Econ. Rev. 81 (1991) 1068). We find that strategy inference is consistent with existing inference, provides new explanations for subject behavior, and provides new empirically based hypotheses regarding ultimatum game strategies. We conclude that strategy inference is potentially useful as a complementary method of statistical inference in applied research.     

后疫情时代银行数字化转型的机遇、挑战与策略

数字化转型已成为银行顺应时代发展和应对竞争压力的必然选择。后疫情时代,银行数字化转型面临着前所未有的政策与技术机遇,但仍然存在着经营环境变化、不良贷款风险攀升、信息识别风险突显和新业务合规风险加剧等诸多挑战。基于创新驱动发展战略理论与经济长远发展趋势,结合疫情后对我国西南地区银行业实地调研成果,对上述机遇和挑战进行了深入阐释和系统剖析。最后从平衡创新和风控关系的视角,提出了后疫情时代助推银行数字化转型的策略体系和举措建议。     

The Structure of Networks in Industrial Districts

In research on industrial districts, network relations among firms and organizations are considered critical for the development and diffusion of new knowledge, with implications for innovation and regional development. A review of this literature, however, suggests that many investigators are surprisingly silent, conceptually and empirically, about the structure of innovative networks, although they often couch their arguments implicitly in structural language. The survey of a sample of 64 empirical industrial district studies shows that few researchers have measured and analysed network structures, and none have studied performance outcomes of variations in network structure. An evolutionary perspective is used to propose a research agenda for a better understanding of the relationship between network structure and innovation. Dans les recherches sur les districts industriels, les réseaux relationnels entre entreprises et organisations sont jugés essentiels pour le développement et la diffusion de nouvelles connaissances, d'où des implications pour l'innovation et l'expansion régionale. A la lumière de ces documents, on constate néanmoins que de nombreux enquèteurs sont étonnamment silencieux, à la fois au plan conceptuel et empirique, sur la structure des réseaux innovants, m? me s'ils formulent souvent leurs arguments implicitement dans un langage structural. L'examen d'un échantillon de 64 études empiriques sur les districts industriels montre que peu de chercheurs ont mesuré et analysé les structures en réseau, et qu'aucun n'a étudié les performances à la suite des variations dans ce type de structure. Appliquant une perspective évolutionniste, l'article propose un programme de recherches pour une meilleure compréhension de la relation entre structure en réseau et innovation.     

The impact of technological relatedness, prior ties, and geographical distance on university-industry collaborations: A joint-patent analysis

Empirical studies on R&D collaborations between universities and firms have mainly centered their attention on universities and firms' characteristics that favor the establishment of collaborative agreements. In this paper, I extend the current research framework investigating the role that specific technological and relational attributes may play on the relevance of such collaborations. Specifically, I focus on the effects exerted by three relevant factors, namely technological relatedness, prior collaboration ties, and geographical distance, on university-industry joint innovation value. I develop testable hypotheses about their impact on the innovative performance of R&D university-industry collaborations, and test them on a sample of 796 university-industry joint patents, developed by 33 universities located in 12 different European countries. Our results suggest that partners' technological relatedness has an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation value. In addition, prior ties and geographical distance between universities and firms are both positively related to the achievement of higher innovative outcomes.     

Justifying health IT investments: A process model of framing practices and reputational value

Despite important research contributions on the financial and operational dimensions of information technology (IT) value, justifying health IT (HIT) investments remains a difficult and enduring issue for IT managers. Recent work has expanded our understanding of HIT value, by focusing on the initial resource allocation stage, and through conceptualizations of value across multiple dimensions. Building on these developments, we adopt a performative perspective to examine the research question of how practitioners justify early stage HIT investments, with a focus on reputational value. We explored this question through a comparative field study of two hospital organizations in the English National Health Service (NHS). We found that practitioners' temporally orientated framing practices matter in justifying HIT investments, enacting different possibilities for reputational value. We develop a process model to explain these dynamics and highlight the mutability of reputational value, which can lead to different possibilities for restoring, enhancing, or maintaining reputation. We conclude by discussing the implications for justifying HIT investments.     

Dynamic capabilities for orchestrating digital innovation ecosystems: Conceptual integration and research opportunities

While most previous research on orchestration of digital innovation ecosystems has examined governance structures, our knowledge of relevant dynamic capabilities remains abstract and lacks conceptual integration. This imbalance limits current knowledge to the extent that digital innovation ecosystem orchestration is mainly considered a structural issue. Based on a synthesis of related literature, we present a novel dynamic capabilities framework that builds on sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities for digital innovation ecosystem orchestration. We differentiate two major challenges addressed in orchestrating such ecosystems: component challenges and complement challenges. We propose six concrete routines that collectively help address these challenges. These include co-creating architectural knowledge, cultivating boundary objects, renegotiating system integration, screening complementors, co-specializing interfaces, and restructuring complementarities. We illustrate each of these routines with examples from the automotive sector. In addition, we sketch trajectories for future research both at the level of the individual routines and at the level of the overall framework.     

Exploring early purchasing involvement in discontinuous innovation: A dynamic capability perspective

This paper aims to address the gap concerning our knowledge about early purchasing's involvement (EPI) in new product development (NPD) projects in contexts characterized by discontinuous innovation. We adopt a dynamic capability perspective to explore how existing sourcing and supplier relationship management capabilities are adapted when purchasing agents become involved in discontinuous innovations projects. We use an embedded case-study approach to study four NPD projects in a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) company. The case studies are based on interviews with managers and staff from the research and development, purchasing, and marketing departments, as well as suppliers involved in the projects. Our empirical findings capture emerging purchasing practices including a “reversed” sourcing process, purchasing-marketing interaction, and the coordination of “a learning atmosphere” between the R&D department and suppliers through proactive innovation meetings and creativity workshops. We derive propositions to conduct further research into the role of the purchasing department in times of discontinuous innovation. We also provide a framework of sourcing and supplier-relationship practices that firms can use when embarking on discontinuous innovation.     

The process of embedding new information technology artifacts into innovative design practices

The design and creation of anything innovative requires knowledge creation, which in turn often depends upon the introduction of innovative information technology (IT). Since design-related practices are deeply integrated with particular IT artifacts, it is no trivial task to migrate practice-based knowledge to unfamiliar IT artifacts. To explore the challenges associated with such migration, we develop the concept of embeddedness of IT artifacts by drawing on research that highlights the critical role of representational artifacts in knowledge, design, and distributed cognition. We then inductively analyze interview data from an in-depth case study of Frank Gehry, a world-renowned and radically innovative architect known for his use of sophisticated 3D computer-aided design (CAD) technology. By studying construction firms' transition from 2D CAD to 3D CAD, we identify four relevant themes associated with embedding new artifacts into knowledge-creating practice: (1) motivating the new artifact; (2) anchoring the new artifact in the old; (3) experimenting with the new artifact; and (4) confidence in using the new artifact. Through the generation of a process theory of embedding, we elaborate on how this perspective complements and extends research on IT adaptation and assimilation, and discuss the relevance of continuing to develop the IT embeddedness perspective given the continuing need for increased levels of IT-enabled innovation.     

How to stimulate supplier innovation? Insights from a multiple case study

Drawing on the literature on supplier innovation, supplier development, and the relational view, we bring forward the concept of stimulation of supplier innovation, which refers to the buyer company's actions which aim to enhance its suppliers' innovativeness, guide its suppliers' innovation processes, and/or encourage its suppliers to share their innovations. Through four case studies about purchasing categories in three companies, we study how the stimulation focus is determined and what methods can be used for stimulating supplier innovation. We propose that stimulation comprises indirect and direct forms of knowledge-sharing and governance with an emphasis on indirect methods and suggest that the concept sheds light on the research gap on the push model of supplier innovation. We also elaborate the literature on supplier development and relational view in the context of supplier innovation.     

Purchasing orchestration practices – Introducing a purchasing-innovation framework

This research investigates the purchasing role in enhancing an organization's innovation performance. Taking a purchasing perspective, this research introduces a new purchasing-innovation framework and specific purchasing orchestration (PO) practices related to the acquisition, integration, re-configuration, and commercialization of critical resources to enhance innovation performance. A theory elaboration methodology is applied to broaden the scope of resource orchestration theory (ROT) and introduce PO practices as an essential enabler of innovation. Qualitative interviews with managers from different industries enrich the theory elaboration process. This research contributes to theory by developing the concept of PO and enhancing the theoretical understanding of its meaning. Based on theory and empirical data, this research elucidates the PO practices of resource structuring, bundling, and leveraging support. The purchasing innovation framework explains how open-mindedness and technological uncertainty influence purchasing orchestration practices and innovation performance. Purchasing managers benefit from this research by learning to identify and address potential PO capability gaps and take a holistic perspective on resource management, looking both upstream and downstream in the supply chain.