Digital Innovation, Entrepreneurship and New Business Models

Track Description
Wave after wave of novel digital technologies are continually enabling new products, processes, and modes of organizing. Digital innovations rooted in mobile and distributed computing, social media, digital platforms, data analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchains, Internet of Things, cloud computing, virtual reality, robots are reshaping and disrupting established ways of doing things. Digital innovations generate new possibilities for innovation and entrepreneurship in a wide range of domains including healthcare, education, retail, finance, manufacturing, and service industries. Indeed, organizations must innovate continuously in order to thrive.

Digital innovation, entrepreneurship and transformation is ubiquitous. Work is increasingly being virtualized, digitalized or even completely automated (Davenport and Kirby 2015). Bots, robots, and autonomous technologies abound – even in some unexpected contexts (Salge and Karahanna 2018; Seidel et al. 2019). Innovation processes themselves are becoming less bounded, more open, less predictable and more fluid (Yoo et al. 2012; Majchrzak and Markus 2013; Nambisan et al. 2017). New forms of venture creation are emerging due to the influence of novel digital technology on entrepreneurship (Nambisan 2017; Autio et al. 2018; von Briel et al. 2018a; von Briel et al. 2018b).

Our track invites researchers to re-evaluate traditional assumptions and create new theories about how digital technologies shape, change or even upend knowledge of processes and outcomes innovation, entrepreneurship and business models. The IS research community is uniquely positioned to address these issues of the imbrication of technological and social forms of venture and value creation for two reasons. First, the information systems field emphasizes knowledge that attends to both technical and social dimensions of organizing. Second, the design research tradition in information systems focuses on need-solution pairing that involves leveraging digital technologies for novel forms of activities.

The research challenges related to digital innovation, entrepreneurship and new business models require the joint effort of scholars with an interest in the role of digital technology, be they from fields of information systems research, management science, organizational studies, innovation management, entrepreneurship or other disciplines. We welcome interdisciplinary work, but require a salient focus on information systems in the formulation of the research objectives and contribution.

Track Chairs
Nicholas Berente, University of Notre Dame, nberente@nd.edu
Anand Gopal, University of Maryland, agopal@rhsmith.umd.edu
Jan Recker, University of Cologne, jan.recker@wiso.uni-koeln.de