IDT - Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World Flashcards
Two fundamental properties of digital technology lead to…
They provide an environment of open and flexible affordances, that are used in creating innovation characterized by convergence and creativity.
(Reprogrammability and data homogenization)
Analysis of convergence and generativity reveal three traits
- The importance of digital tech. platforms
- The emergence of distributed innovation
- The prevalence of combinatorial innovation
Technology affordance (definition)
What an individual or organization (with a particular purpose/goal) can do with a technology or IS
Pervasive Digital Technology
The incorporation of digital capabilities into objects that previously had a purely physical materiality (e.g. Wifi-enabled toothbrush)
Pervasive digital technologies enable devices and machines to be always on, independent, provide insights and predict actions.
These technologies are making every objects communicate, perform tasks with minimum human intervention and are becoming in almost all industries like aerospace, oil and gas, medical and many more.
Three convergences enabled by pervasive digital technology
- Brings prev. separate user experiences together in one product
- Digital technologies increasingly embedded in previously nondigital artifacts
- Brings prev. separate industries together
Generative innovation enabled by pervasive digital technology
- Procrastinated binding of form and function (definition)
- Wakes of innovation
- Use of p.g.t. leaves an unprecendented volume of digital traces as by-products
Procrastinated binding of form and function (definition)
New capabilities can be added after a product or tool has been designed and produced
Wakes of innovation
Certain (groups of) innovation enabling dramatically new possibilities
For example, the introduction of a suite of 3D visualization tools in the construction industry changed the role and scope of surveyors, dramatically increasing the number of points they located during a construction project (Boland et al. 2007).
Platform (definition by Gawer, 2009)
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
Three implications of the emergence of digital platforms
- Firms can now design and control multiple products or subsystems using the same digital tools that would have required different tools in the past
- Firms share more data and processes across org. boundaries as they leverage more standardized tools
- Innovation activities increasingly become horizontal as efficiencies are gained by applying the same innovation activities and knowledge across multiple products or platforms
Four organizational implications of distributed innovation
- Knowledge resources will be increasingly heterogeneous and only temporarily integrated. Heterogeneity and integration levels will change dynamically in response to unpredictable internal and external changes
- Distributed innovation increasingly requires other to be able to innovate as well
- Emergence of new industrial structures
- New form of risk as digital tech. assumes decontextualization of representation from physical objects and individuals
Combinatorial Innovation
Creating of new products or services by combining existing modules with embedded digital capabilities
Four important implications of Combinatorial Innovation
- Modularity is crucial for CI, therefore modularity needs to be expanded in order to fully support CI with pervasive digital technologies
- Orgs. need to invest in new firms of creativity. They need to build environments for constrained serendipity, and this behavior needs to be supported among distributed orgs.
- Combinatorial innovation doesn’t follow an S-curve, but instead a contagious spread of ideas in a social network
- Heightened complexity of the innovation process
