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.

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.

On Options and Debt in Digital Platforms: In memory of Knut Rolland

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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