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.     

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.     

Bridging the research-practice divide: Harnessing expertise collaboration in making a wider set of contributions

Understanding how we develop research contributions which go beyond conversations in the academic field is an enduring challenge. While much has been written on the importance of academic-practitioner relationships in the research process more is needed on conceptualizing how we develop a wider set of contributions. In this paper, we call for researchers to be reflective as to how different forms of expertise can be drawn on during collaborative relationships to bridge the research – practice divide. We develop a framework which combines different levels of expertise with varying forms of academic-practitioner collaboration to widen the impact of our research. Four strategies are proposed by which academics may leverage their expertise in collaborative relationships with practitioners to develop Research Impact and Contributions To Knowledge (RICK). These include: maintaining critical distance, promoting deeper engagement, developing prescience, and achieving hybrid practices. We discuss implementation approaches for each of these RICK strategies and suggest writing genres to help increase engagement by practitioners in research contributions.     

Community-based research: Engaging universities in technology-related knowledge exchanges

Many universities are disengaged from their local regions. While universities are hotbeds of knowledge with the potential to generate new and disruptive technologies, their development strategies and public relations engagements rarely emphasize the potential of universities to act as local and regional economic engines. Similarly, information systems (IS) and other scholars generally aim to make international, not local impacts. Local contributions are often viewed as distractions from more visible and highly rewarded roles in the global scholarly community, such as publishing in international journals. This Global Challenge article argues that universities' local ecosystems are appropriate targets for IS scholarly activity, particularly when this is undertaken in the form of community-based research (CBR). Following conceptual discussions of ‘community’ and key elements of CBR, we draw on the authors' personal research experiences to evaluate the potential contributions of IS scholars in terms of CBR projects focused on technology-related knowledge exchange. After outlining implications and potential future directions for IS researchers, we close by presenting a call to IS scholars to intensify their local ecosystem research collaborations in technology-related knowledge exchanges contexts, in order to increase the relevance and local impact of their research.     

Work curiosity: A new lens for understanding employee creativity

Curiosity has long been recognized as the driving force behind individuals' exploratory drive, learning behavior, and willingness to embrace novelty. It is generally believed that the exploratory spirit of a curious mind can enhance the individual's imagination and cognitive capability for creative ideation. But there has been surprisingly little work to clarify the relationship between curiosity and creativity. Moreover, existing research commonly oversimplifies the operationalization of human curiosity. From a pluralist view of curiosity, this paper leverages insights from psychological research to explain how curiosity can be applied in the organizational context and help to better understand employee creativity. We draw upon several seminal theories on curiosity and motivation and explore the effects of organizational context and individual differences on employees' work curiosity. We furthermore elucidate how work curiosity leads to employee creativity by affecting the cognitive processes and psychological states. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Supply chain finance schemes in the procurement of agricultural products

Product, information, and finance flows are all interrelated within the modern supply chain; thus, it is now more than ever of paramount importance for practitioners to integrate procurement and financial decisions. This challenge is exemplified in many agricultural supply chains, where operational risks are significant and access to capital differs sharply across firms. We study three management tactics that some large food/beverage manufacturers – situated downstream in these chains – have used to meet the challenge: ordinary fixed price contracts (or soft tolling) with direct suppliers, hard tolling and contract farming where the manufacturer intervenes upstream, providing capital, and coordinating procurement decisions. We place these upstream intervention schemes in the theoretical context of supply chain finance (SCF) and model their application to a three-echelon agricultural supply chain. We perform a numerical study in order to understand how the structure of capital constraints in the chain may influence the manufacturer's choice of SCF scheme. The numerical study is based on a business case that reflects the barley–malt supply chain of Heineken N.V. Despite greater coordination opportunities, we show that upstream intervention is not necessarily preferable for the manufacturer. Nevertheless, the preferred SCF scheme can be inferred on the basis of relatively simple characterization of the capital constraints in the supply chain.     

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.     

Working and organizing in the age of the learning algorithm

Learning algorithms, technologies that generate responses, classifications, or dynamic predictions that resemble those of a knowledge worker, raise important research questions for organizational scholars related to work and organizing. We suggest that such algorithms are distinguished by four consequential aspects: black-boxed performance, comprehensive digitization, anticipatory quantification, and hidden politics. These aspects are likely to alter work and organizing in qualitatively different ways beyond simply signaling an acceleration of long-term technology trends. Our analysis indicates that learning algorithms will transform expertise in organizations, reshape work and occupational boundaries, and offer novel forms of coordination and control. Thus, learning algorithms can be considered performative due to the extent to which their use can shape and alter work and organizational realities. Their rapid deployment requires scholarly attention to societal issues such as the extent to which the algorithm is authorized to make decisions, the need to incorporate morality in the technology, and their digital iron-cage potential.     

The role of perceived justice in buyer-supplier relationships in times of economic crisis

This paper explores the importance of perceived organisational justice in times of crises, when supplier commitment has the potential to offset the negative impact of external pressures on business performance. We draw data from a survey of 117 suppliers of a major Greek grocery retailer. The grocery retail sector in Greece suffered considerably during the peak of the financial crisis, in 2016, providing a unique opportunity to explore the role of fairness in buyer-supplier relationships in times of crisis. The paper makes a distinct contribution by exploring the role that POJ plays in mitigating the impact of a financial crisis on suppliers’ performance, both operational and financial. Moreover, we explore the role of commitment as a mediator between POJ and performance, in the specific context of a financial crisis. Our findings indicate that organisational justice influences firm performance through commitment and that the financial crisis moderates the relationship.     

A cybernetic model of work-life balance through time

Answering a call for a more fully developed concept of work-life balance (WLB), we use person-environment fit and control theories to develop a model of WLB incorporating the work, family, and personal domains. We propose a cybernetic model which recognizes that individuals have a desired balance among the three domains that serves as a standard against which they compare their perceptions of WLB at any given point in time. Our cybernetic model suggests that individuals will seek to restore balance when a negative imbalance is perceived. Further we propose that role senders and resources in the domains, as well as anticipated future WLB and retrospective perceptions of WLB also affect desired balance and actions. We discuss the implications of the proposed model for future research and practice.     

The effects of feeding back experts’ own initial ratings in Delphi studies: A randomized trial

This study examined the effects of feeding back experts’ initial ratings on three Delphi outcome measures: (1) the percentage of items on which experts changed their opinion; (2) the degree to which experts changed their ratings towards the group response; and (3) the increase in the level of agreement among experts. Additionally, two conformity indices were developed. Within a real-world Delphi study, experts were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: either their initial ratings were included in feedback (IN) or excluded from feedback (EX). Results showed that experts in the EX condition changed their opinion relatively more often than experts in the IN condition. Results also suggested that experts in the EX condition changed their ratings to a greater degree towards the group response than experts in the IN condition. No difference between conditions was found regarding the increase in the level of agreement.     

Improving social harm indices with a modulated Hawkes process

Communities are affected adversely by a range of social harm events, such as crime, traffic crashes, medical emergencies, and drug use. The police, fire, health and social service departments are tasked with mitigating such social harm through various types of interventions. While various different social harm indices have been proposed for allocating resources to spatially fixed hotspots, the risk of social harm events is dynamic, and new algorithms and software systems that are capable of quickly identifying risks and triggering appropriate public safety responses are needed. We propose a novel modulated Hawkes process for this purpose that offers flexible approaches to both (i) the incorporation of spatial covariates and leading indicators for variance reduction in the case of rarer event categories, and (ii) the capture of dynamic hotspot formation through self-excitation. We present an efficient l1-penalized EM algorithm for estimating the model that performs feature selection for the spatial covariates of each incident type simultaneously. We provide simulation results using data from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department in order to illustrate the advantages of the modulated Hawkes process model of social harm over various recently introduced social harm indices and property crime Hawkes processes.