L01 A: Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research

Question 1

Assumptions of Innovation Management Theories that Digital Innovation Challenges

Answer 1

• Less bounded innovations: With digitization,
  (a) continuously shifting structural boundaries for innovation outcomes, and
  (b) continuously shifting spatial and temporal boundaries for innovation processes.
• Less predefinition in innovation agency:
  With digitization, a shift from predefined set of focal innovation agents to evolving, innovation collectives with diverse goals, motives, and capabilities.
• Less boundaries between innovation process and outcomes: With digitization, less demarcation and more complex, dynamic
  interaction between innovation processes and outcomes.

Question 2

New Logics of Theorizing about Digitization of Innovation

Answer 2

• Dynamic problem–solution design pairing
• Socio-cognitive sense making
• Technology affordances and constraints
• Orchestration

Question 3

Dynamic problem–solution design pairing

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Socio-cognitive sense making

Answer 4

Shared cognition and joint sense making as critical element of digital innovation management; “narratives” (embedded in digital artifacts and supported by digital 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).

Question 5

Technology affordances and constraints

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Orchestration

Answer 6

Problem–solution matching as a micro foundation 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.