Articles MDI
Week 1
Nambisan, S. et al. (2017). Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation
Management Research in a Digital World.
Digital innovation is the use of digital technology during the process of innovating. Digital
innovation has:
Changed the nature and structure of new products and services
Spawned novel value creation and value appropriation pathways
Enabled innovation collectives that involve dynamic sets of actors with diverse goals
and capabilities
Transformed entire industries in its wake
Different definitions of digital innovation:
The creation of (and consequent change in) market offerings, business processes, or
models that result from the use of digital technology.
In digital innovation, digital technologies and associated digitizing processes form an
innate part of the new idea and/or its development, diffusion, or assimilation.
Digital innovation management refers to the practices, processes, and principles
that underlie the effective orchestration of digital innovation.
Challenging Key Assumptions of Innovation Management Theories
1. Innovation is a well-bounded phenomenon focused on fixed products and therefore
the question of how innovations form/evolve is a well-bounded question.
2. The nature of the innovation agency is centralized, and therefore actors/entities can
organize for innovation.
3. Innovation processes and outcomes are distinctly different phenomenon, and
therefore there is interaction between the nature and organization of innovation
that can be explicitly theorized.
Is innovation a Well-bounded phenomenon?
Digital technologies and artifacts have unique characteristics they are malleable,
editable, open, transferable etc. Ambivalent ontologies: the scope, features and value of
digital offerings can continue to evolve even after the innovation has been launched or
implemented. Most digital designs remain somewhat incomplete and in a state of flux
where both the scale and scope of the innovation can be expanded by various participating
innovation actors. This results in a high level of unpredictability and dynamism; boundaries
on what is or is not an innovation outcome have become more fluid. Innovation processes
also have become less bounded, in terms of their temporal structure. Specifically, the
digitization of innovation processes helps to break down the boundaries between different
innovation phases and brings a greater level of unpredictability and overlap in their time
horizons.
1
,New digital infrastructures:
Enable product ideas to be quickly formed, enacted and modified
Making it less clear as to when a particular innovation process phase starts and/or
ends
Facilitate rapid scaling up of product implementation plans
Less bounded innovation outcomes and processes also reflect newer success criteria and
demand newer theories that incorporate such metrics and underlying factors.
Can Innovation Agency Be Predefined?
Distributed innovation agency is an innovation context wherein a dynamic and often
unexpected collection of actors with diverse goals and motives – often outside the control
of the primary innovator – engage in the innovation process. This is a heterogeneous group
who constitutes the agency necessary to innovate successfully. Such collectives are also
highly dynamic in that actors (individuals, organizations, etc.) can opt in and out while their
goals change, new competencies are needed, motivations shifts, complementary capabilities
need to be garnered, new constraints and opportunities emerge, or varying contributions
become recognized.
For innovation outcomes, digital platforms and open standards enable collectives (of
organizations or individuals) to pursue innovation collaboratively. For innovation processes,
collaboration among collectives is enabled by such digital infrastructural capabilities as
knowledge sharing and work execution platforms, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, virtual
worlds, digital makerspaces, and dedicated social media.
Can Studies of Innovation Processes and Outcomes Focus on the One and Not on the other?
With digitization, dependencies between innovation processes and innovation outcomes are
complex and dynamic. Digitizing innovation involves processes and outcomes
(product/services) shaping and being shaped by the other.
Four theoretical logics or conceptual elements that IS researchers are particularly skilled at
exploring.
Dynamic Problem-Solution Design Pairing
Digital innovation management as a sporadic, parallel, and heterogeneous generation,
forking, merging, termination, and refinement of problem–solution design pairs.
Acknowledges the fluid boundaries of the innovation space and the potential for innovation
agency to be distributed.
Socio-Cognitive Sensemaking
Shared cognition and joint sensemaking as critical element of digital innovation
management; “narratives” (embedded in digital artifacts and supported by digital
2
,technologies) as a vehicle for such socio-cognitive sense- making. Acknowledges the fluid
boundaries of the innovation space and the heterogeneous actors that populate it
(distributed innovation agency).
Technology affordances and constraints
Considers digital technology use as sets of affordances and constraints for particular
innovating actors and helps explain how and why the “same” technology can be repurposed
by different actors or has different innovation outcomes in different contexts.
Acknowledges the receding distinctions (and the accompanying duality) between innovation
processes and outcomes.
Orchestration
Problem–solution matching as a microfoundation of digital innovation orchestration;
increasing role of digital technologies in enabling or supporting such orchestration.
Acknowledges the fluid boundaries of the innovation space and the potential for innovation
agency to be distributed.
Yoo, Y. et al. (2012). Organizing for innovation in the digitized world.
The pervasive adoptions of and innovations with digital technologies are radically changing
the nature of products and services. A defining characteristic of pervasive digital technology
is the incorporation of digital capabilities into objects that previously had a purely physical
materiality. Physical materiality refers to artifacts that can be seen and touched, that are
generally hard to change, and that connote a sense of place and time. Digital materiality, in
contrast, refers to what the software incorporated into an artifact can do by manipulating
digital representations. The uniquely powerful affordances of digital technologies allow
designers to expand existing physical materiality by “entangling” it with software-based
digital capabilities. Digital materiality enabled by pervasive digital technology presents new
possibilities for creating experiences, relationships, processes, and organizational forms.
The fundamental, unique properties of digital technology include reprogrammable
functionality and data homogenization (enabled by discrete representation of data in bits of
0 and 1). As digital technologies become pervasive, these properties provide environments
of open and flexible affordances that result in two unique characteristics of organizational
innovation with digital technologies: convergence and generativity.
Convergent and Generative Characteristics of Pervasive Digital Technology Innovation
Technology affordance an action potential, that is, to what an individual or organization
with a particular purpose can do with a technology or information system.
The affordances of pervasive digital technology enable innovations of convergence in a
number of ways:
3
, Innovation with pervasive digital technology brings previously separate user
experiences together e.g. TV, internet & phone together
Digital technology is increasingly embedded into previously nondigital physical
artifacts, creating so-called “smart” products and tools.
Bringing together previously separate industries.
The affordances of pervasive digital technology also produce innovations characterized by
generativity, or a technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by
large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences. Generativity means that digital technologies
become inherently dynamic and malleable.
Because of its reprogrammable nature, pervasive digital technology exhibits a
procrastinated binding of form and function new capabilities can be added after a
product or a tool has been designed and produced.
The generativity of pervasive digital technology is manifested in wakes of innovation
It leaves an unprecedented volume of digital traces as by-products. The innovative
uses of these digital traces can lead to new innovations that were not anticipated by
the original innovators or consumers derivative innovations; add new layers of
affordances to digital products and services
Organizational Innovation with Pervasive Digital Technology
Three traits of innovation associated with pervasive digital technology:
1. The importance of digital technology platforms
A platform is a building block, providing an essential function to a technological system—
which acts as a foundation upon which other firms can develop complementary products,
technologies or services. The role of a platform for innovations with pervasive digital
technology can be seen from two different perspectives:
To harness the convergence and generativity made possible by pervasive digital
technology, firms now innovate by creating platforms rather than single products.
The platform and its modules from an ecosystem that includes heterogeneous
actors.
The proliferation of digital tools or digital components allows firms to build a
platform not just of products but of digital capabilities used throughout the
organization to support its different functions.
The emergence of a platform as a key element for innovations with pervasive digital
technologies has several important implications for organizational inquiry:
Organizations must be designed to manage the delicate balance of generativity and
control in the platform. When an organization exercises too much control over the
platform, it runs the risk of driving out third-party developers, thus choking the
generativity of its platform. When organizations do not exercise any control, the
platform becomes too varied and fragmented and thus it becomes less useful for
4
Week 1
Nambisan, S. et al. (2017). Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation
Management Research in a Digital World.
Digital innovation is the use of digital technology during the process of innovating. Digital
innovation has:
Changed the nature and structure of new products and services
Spawned novel value creation and value appropriation pathways
Enabled innovation collectives that involve dynamic sets of actors with diverse goals
and capabilities
Transformed entire industries in its wake
Different definitions of digital innovation:
The creation of (and consequent change in) market offerings, business processes, or
models that result from the use of digital technology.
In digital innovation, digital technologies and associated digitizing processes form an
innate part of the new idea and/or its development, diffusion, or assimilation.
Digital innovation management refers to the practices, processes, and principles
that underlie the effective orchestration of digital innovation.
Challenging Key Assumptions of Innovation Management Theories
1. Innovation is a well-bounded phenomenon focused on fixed products and therefore
the question of how innovations form/evolve is a well-bounded question.
2. The nature of the innovation agency is centralized, and therefore actors/entities can
organize for innovation.
3. Innovation processes and outcomes are distinctly different phenomenon, and
therefore there is interaction between the nature and organization of innovation
that can be explicitly theorized.
Is innovation a Well-bounded phenomenon?
Digital technologies and artifacts have unique characteristics they are malleable,
editable, open, transferable etc. Ambivalent ontologies: the scope, features and value of
digital offerings can continue to evolve even after the innovation has been launched or
implemented. Most digital designs remain somewhat incomplete and in a state of flux
where both the scale and scope of the innovation can be expanded by various participating
innovation actors. This results in a high level of unpredictability and dynamism; boundaries
on what is or is not an innovation outcome have become more fluid. Innovation processes
also have become less bounded, in terms of their temporal structure. Specifically, the
digitization of innovation processes helps to break down the boundaries between different
innovation phases and brings a greater level of unpredictability and overlap in their time
horizons.
1
,New digital infrastructures:
Enable product ideas to be quickly formed, enacted and modified
Making it less clear as to when a particular innovation process phase starts and/or
ends
Facilitate rapid scaling up of product implementation plans
Less bounded innovation outcomes and processes also reflect newer success criteria and
demand newer theories that incorporate such metrics and underlying factors.
Can Innovation Agency Be Predefined?
Distributed innovation agency is an innovation context wherein a dynamic and often
unexpected collection of actors with diverse goals and motives – often outside the control
of the primary innovator – engage in the innovation process. This is a heterogeneous group
who constitutes the agency necessary to innovate successfully. Such collectives are also
highly dynamic in that actors (individuals, organizations, etc.) can opt in and out while their
goals change, new competencies are needed, motivations shifts, complementary capabilities
need to be garnered, new constraints and opportunities emerge, or varying contributions
become recognized.
For innovation outcomes, digital platforms and open standards enable collectives (of
organizations or individuals) to pursue innovation collaboratively. For innovation processes,
collaboration among collectives is enabled by such digital infrastructural capabilities as
knowledge sharing and work execution platforms, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, virtual
worlds, digital makerspaces, and dedicated social media.
Can Studies of Innovation Processes and Outcomes Focus on the One and Not on the other?
With digitization, dependencies between innovation processes and innovation outcomes are
complex and dynamic. Digitizing innovation involves processes and outcomes
(product/services) shaping and being shaped by the other.
Four theoretical logics or conceptual elements that IS researchers are particularly skilled at
exploring.
Dynamic Problem-Solution Design Pairing
Digital innovation management as a sporadic, parallel, and heterogeneous generation,
forking, merging, termination, and refinement of problem–solution design pairs.
Acknowledges the fluid boundaries of the innovation space and the potential for innovation
agency to be distributed.
Socio-Cognitive Sensemaking
Shared cognition and joint sensemaking as critical element of digital innovation
management; “narratives” (embedded in digital artifacts and supported by digital
2
,technologies) as a vehicle for such socio-cognitive sense- making. Acknowledges the fluid
boundaries of the innovation space and the heterogeneous actors that populate it
(distributed innovation agency).
Technology affordances and constraints
Considers digital technology use as sets of affordances and constraints for particular
innovating actors and helps explain how and why the “same” technology can be repurposed
by different actors or has different innovation outcomes in different contexts.
Acknowledges the receding distinctions (and the accompanying duality) between innovation
processes and outcomes.
Orchestration
Problem–solution matching as a microfoundation of digital innovation orchestration;
increasing role of digital technologies in enabling or supporting such orchestration.
Acknowledges the fluid boundaries of the innovation space and the potential for innovation
agency to be distributed.
Yoo, Y. et al. (2012). Organizing for innovation in the digitized world.
The pervasive adoptions of and innovations with digital technologies are radically changing
the nature of products and services. A defining characteristic of pervasive digital technology
is the incorporation of digital capabilities into objects that previously had a purely physical
materiality. Physical materiality refers to artifacts that can be seen and touched, that are
generally hard to change, and that connote a sense of place and time. Digital materiality, in
contrast, refers to what the software incorporated into an artifact can do by manipulating
digital representations. The uniquely powerful affordances of digital technologies allow
designers to expand existing physical materiality by “entangling” it with software-based
digital capabilities. Digital materiality enabled by pervasive digital technology presents new
possibilities for creating experiences, relationships, processes, and organizational forms.
The fundamental, unique properties of digital technology include reprogrammable
functionality and data homogenization (enabled by discrete representation of data in bits of
0 and 1). As digital technologies become pervasive, these properties provide environments
of open and flexible affordances that result in two unique characteristics of organizational
innovation with digital technologies: convergence and generativity.
Convergent and Generative Characteristics of Pervasive Digital Technology Innovation
Technology affordance an action potential, that is, to what an individual or organization
with a particular purpose can do with a technology or information system.
The affordances of pervasive digital technology enable innovations of convergence in a
number of ways:
3
, Innovation with pervasive digital technology brings previously separate user
experiences together e.g. TV, internet & phone together
Digital technology is increasingly embedded into previously nondigital physical
artifacts, creating so-called “smart” products and tools.
Bringing together previously separate industries.
The affordances of pervasive digital technology also produce innovations characterized by
generativity, or a technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by
large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences. Generativity means that digital technologies
become inherently dynamic and malleable.
Because of its reprogrammable nature, pervasive digital technology exhibits a
procrastinated binding of form and function new capabilities can be added after a
product or a tool has been designed and produced.
The generativity of pervasive digital technology is manifested in wakes of innovation
It leaves an unprecedented volume of digital traces as by-products. The innovative
uses of these digital traces can lead to new innovations that were not anticipated by
the original innovators or consumers derivative innovations; add new layers of
affordances to digital products and services
Organizational Innovation with Pervasive Digital Technology
Three traits of innovation associated with pervasive digital technology:
1. The importance of digital technology platforms
A platform is a building block, providing an essential function to a technological system—
which acts as a foundation upon which other firms can develop complementary products,
technologies or services. The role of a platform for innovations with pervasive digital
technology can be seen from two different perspectives:
To harness the convergence and generativity made possible by pervasive digital
technology, firms now innovate by creating platforms rather than single products.
The platform and its modules from an ecosystem that includes heterogeneous
actors.
The proliferation of digital tools or digital components allows firms to build a
platform not just of products but of digital capabilities used throughout the
organization to support its different functions.
The emergence of a platform as a key element for innovations with pervasive digital
technologies has several important implications for organizational inquiry:
Organizations must be designed to manage the delicate balance of generativity and
control in the platform. When an organization exercises too much control over the
platform, it runs the risk of driving out third-party developers, thus choking the
generativity of its platform. When organizations do not exercise any control, the
platform becomes too varied and fragmented and thus it becomes less useful for
4
