Virtual Nordic ISS Seminar Consortium
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Below you can see the list of past seminars. 

January 14 - Sirkka Jarvenpaa, University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business

Digital Resourcing for Nascent Digital Ventures: Rethinking Technology Development Approaches for the Pursuit of Multiple Ends

Joint work with Shi Ying Lim, National University of Singapore

The current literature in information systems provides little guidance on how digital ventures create new digital resources or draw on resources-in-use to achieve multiple entrepreneurial ends, such as revenue, growth and identity. The extant focus in single ends precludes our understanding of how these ends may compete for entrepreneurs’ attention and resources in the short term. We review the digital entrepreneurship literature and build on the resourcing perspective from organizational sciences to propose the notion of digital resourcing. Digital resourcing explains how entrepreneurs  accumulate and configure digital resources in ampliative cycles to achieve their desired ends. We extend the technology development approaches to incorporate the resourcing meta-mechanisms of mutual adaptation, juxtaposition, and narratives to theorize about how they can build entrepreneurial resilience. Linking together the resourcing, digital entrepreneurship, and technology development literature, we shed new insight into the interdependencies between the multiple ends and the technology development actions and importance of cognitive elements (e.g. visioning) that bounds the decisions. The digital resourcing perspective will allow IS researchers to develop more relevant models of resilient, nascent digital ventures.

January 28 - Ola Henfridsson, University of Miami, Miami Herbert Business School

EXTENDING DIGITAL VENTURES THROUGH TEMPLATING

In collaboration with Jimmy Huang and Martin Liu

Digital ventures typically face significant growth expectations. A common response is to extend the current operations into new areas through repurposing its digital core (e.g., new search engine, data mining technique, platform, or voice interface). Grounded in prior literature, we surmise that the high-versatility of the digital venture’s digital core facilitates such extension by reducing cost and increasing speed. However, we know little about the process by which digital ventures draw on their digital core to extend current operations. To this end, we use Penrose’s work for analyzing a two-year in-depth case study of a Chinese digital venture's extension of their initial operations based on its credit rating technology. Our findings suggest that digital venture extension is facilitated by templating, which is a digitally-enabled process of generating and using generic solutions across business areas. Through our grounded analysis, we unpack templating by tracing three processes contributing to digital venture extension: concepting, generalizing, and porting. Synthesizing our findings, we contribute to the emerging digital innovation and entrepreneurship literature by developing a process model of digital venture extension.


Ola Henfridsson is a Professor of Business Technology at Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami. His research interests relate to digital innovation, platforms, and technology management. Ola teaches graduate and undergraduate courses related to technology, innovation, and artificial intelligence. He is co-director of the Business Analytics and Technology research cluster. 
Ola is a (part-time) WBS Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick Business School, where he used to serve as Professor and Head of the Information Systems and Management group for more than six years. During his time as a head, the ISM group at Warwick established themselves as the #1 information systems group in Europe in terms of research productivity. He has worked and consulted with leading companies such as General Motors, Mecel, Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, and many more. He is a KIN Fellow at VU Amsterdam. He is also an external expert for the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management at the London School of Economics. He was a runner-up for the Warwick University 2015 "Outstanding Contribution to Research Excellence" award. He received a Warwick Business School award for "Outstanding Contribution to Research" in 2016-2017. He has won multiple WBS awards for teaching at the PhD, DBA, and MSc programs. 
Ola earned his PhD at Umeå University, Sweden, in 1999. During 10 years at the Viktoria Institute, he managed a research group on digital innovation in the automotive industry and eventually became the institute's Research Director. Ola has been a professor at Chalmers University of Technology and visiting professor at University of Gothenburg, University of Oslo, University of Sydney, and Georgia State University.   
Ola's research has been published in world-elite journals such as Academy of Management Review, Information Systems ResearchMIS Quarterly, and Organization Science. He is a Senior Editor of Information Systems Research (2015-2020). He is a former Senior Editor of the MIS Quarterly. Ola is the Chair of the AoM OCIS division for 2019-2020. He is president of the newly founded AIS special issue group on Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship (AIS SIGDITE). He was program co-chair for the ICIS conference in Seoul in 2017 together with Christina Soh and Youngjin Yoo. He was Program Chair for AoM OCIS at Chicago in 2018. He recently completed an ISR special issue on Digital Infrastructure and Platforms with Panos Constantinides and Geoff Parker, and a JSIS special issue on Digital Entrepreneurship with Sirkka Jarvenpaa and Yulin Fang.

March 4 - Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University, The Weatherhead School of Management

The Unknowability of Autonomous Tools and The Liminal Experience of Their Use

See the slides here

March 25 - Carsten Sorenssen, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Let’s Talk Digital Infrastructure: The Digital Reordering of Rights, Networks, and Community

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying," said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." He smiled weakly. He pointed at the knees of his trousers and held his arms up to show the elbows. They were all torn and worn through… One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.”

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Life, the Universe and Everything (Adams 1982)


The technical process of digitizing analogue data into digital bit-streams and the associated socio-technical processes of digitalisation has yet to fully reveal their disruptive potentials – yet researchers and practitioners alike must comprehend these phenomena. Digitalization removes tight couplings between an informational object and associated technologies for storage, processing, and distribution. These characteristics brings to the fore the complex socio-technical and socio-economic relationships between Internet-enabled digital infrastructures and the business arrangements facilitated by and in turn shaping these infrastructures. One result has been the explosive growth and dominance of a few global digital platforms. New challenges emerge when the digital infrastructure shifts beyond a value-agnostic open IP-based Internet and to become a value-sensitive digital infrastructure transmitting digital rights. The presentation will seek to provide an overview of multi-year research on the innovation dynamics of digital infrastructures with an emphasis on broader research themes rather than detailed research hypotheses. Inspired by the Douglas Adams quote above, digitalisation involves complex continual balancing of contradicting concerns at times defying business orthodoxy.

See the slides here


Carsten Sørensen is Reader (Associate Professor) in Digital Innovation within Department of Management at The London School of Economics and Political Science (carstensorensen.com). He holds a BSc. in mathematics, an MSc in computer science and a Ph.D. in information systems from Aalborg University, Denmark. Carsten has since the 1980s researched digital innovation, for example innovating the digital enterprise through mobile technology (enterprisemobilitybook.com), and the innovation dynamics of mobile infrastructures and -platforms (digitalinfrastructures.org). He developed LSEs first blockchain course, an online course on cryptocurrency disruption. Carsten has published widely within Information Systems since 1989 (scholar.carstensorensen.com), for example in MISQ, ISR, JMIS, ISJ, JIT, Information & Organization, The Information Society, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. This body of work has been cited nearly 7000 times with a h-index of 37 (scholar.carstensorensen.com). Carsten also has extensive experience managing national, EU, and industry research projects with research grants totaling over £3 million. He has for a number of years been engaged in assisting and assessing digital start-ups and has for 25 years been actively engaged in academic consultant and executive education with a broad range of organisations – IMF, Microsoft, Google, PA Consulting, Huawei, Orange, Vodafone, Intel, GEMS, to name just a few. Most recently, he has contributed to a report with Gowling WLG on the tides of digital disruption.

April 1 - Erik Stolterman Bergqvist, Indiana University Bloomington, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

The changing nature of interaction and interactivity

In this talk I will present the work I have done for many years, together with my colleague Lars-Erik Janlert. As our approach, maybe best described as analytical and philosophical, we have examined properties and qualities of designed artifacts and systems; primarily those properties that are open for manipulation to designers, that is, properties that designers can and do intentionally affect by their design decisions (and thus in principle are possible to control). Rather than taking users and their subjective experiences of the artifacts and systems as the primary target for examination, unfashionable as it may be, we have chosen to be objective in the sense of focusing on the artifacts and systems. Apart from discussing our approach, I will briefly introduce some of our main results consisting of some developed definitions of existing (and some new) concepts, such as, interactivity, interactability, interactiveness. I will end with some comments on what this kind of investigation can tell us about the future by introducing the notions of faceless interaction, interactivity clutter, and interactivity fields.

See the slides here

April 8 - Aleksi Aaltonen, Temple University, Fox School of Business

The Making of Data Commodities: Data Analytics as an Embedded Process

This paper studies the process by which data are generated, managed, and assembled into tradable objects we call data commodities. We link the making of such objects to the open and editable nature of digital data and to the emerging big data industry in which they are diffused items of exchange, repurposing, and aggregation. We empirically investigate the making of data commodities in the context of an innovative telecommunications operator, analyzing its efforts to produce advertising audiences by repurposing data from the network infrastructure. The analysis unpacks the processes by which data are repurposed and aggregated into novel data-based objects that acquire organizational and industry relevance through carefully maintained metrics and practices of data management and interpretation. Building from our findings, we develop a process theory that explains the transformations data undergo on their way to becoming commodities and shows how these transformations are related to organizational practices and to the editable, portable, and recontextualizable attributes of data. The theory complements the standard picture of data encountered in data science and analytics and renews and extends the promise of a constructivist IS research into the age of datafication. The results provide practitioners, regulators included, vital insights concerning data management practices that produce commodities from data.

See the slides here

April 22 - Eivor Oborn, Warwick Business School

Digital Innovation during crisis: the organising role of institutional logics

How do crises shape digital innovation? In this paper we examine the rapid adoption of digital telemedicine technologies in an Israeli hospital with a focus on the role of the institutional logics held by the stakeholders responding to emerging events. With the onset of COVID-19, the need for social distancing and minimal physical contact challenged and interrupted hospital practices. In response, remote audio-visual functionality of digital technologies were appropriated in different ways, as stakeholders – state actors, managers, health professionals, and family members – sought to improvise and enhance the protection of persons concerned. We show how emerging practices were guided by the dominant institutional logics of stakeholders responding to the crisis. Acting for many as a digital form of ‘personal protective equipment’ (PPE), the technologies enabled diverse action possibilities to become manifest in practices. We add to understanding the role of institutional logics in directing the attention of stakeholders to shape digital innovation in times of crisis.

May 6 (16:00-17:30) - Panel discussion on doing PhD studies in the Nordic way

This last session of Virtual for Spring 2021 is dedicated to doctoral students and their questions, but we hope that also more senior members of our community will join the discussion.

To get started, we have a panel (moderated by Virpi Tuunainen) of four professors from different participating institutions, who will each first offer their “3 essential tips for PhD students”. You can add your questions or topics for discussion to the Ask-it Basket beforehand, or ask them during the session.

Panel members:

  • Ioanna Constantiou, Copenhagen Business School
  • Jonny Holmström, Umeå University
  • Elena Parmiggiani, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Matti Rossi, Aalto University
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