Digital Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and New Business Models

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 are ubiquitous. Work is increasingly being virtualized, digitalized, or even completely automated. Bots, robots, and autonomous technologies abound – even in some unexpected contexts. New platform-based forms of digital organizing have emerged that take advantage of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer, and virtual or augmented reality. Practices of valuation have been transformed through the rise of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and TripAdvisor; Innovation processes themselves are becoming less bounded, more open, less predictable and more fluid. New forms of venture creation are emerging due to the influence of novel digital technology on entrepreneurship. New business models of the sharing economy, (e.g., Uber, Lyft, AirBnB) are disrupting traditional industries and creating new marketspaces.

Our track invites researchers to re-evaluate traditional assumptions and create new theories about how digital technologies shape, change, or even upend knowledge about processes and outcomes of innovation, entrepreneurship, and new business models. The IS research community is uniquely positioned to address these issues, for at least two reasons. First, the information systems field emphasizes knowledge that attends to socio-technical organizing. Second, design research in information systems has a tradition of leveraging digital technologies for novel forms of activities. The research challenges related to issues of 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.

We welcome research from any tradition that advances existing theories or generates new theoretical lenses. We welcome conceptual, empirical (qualitative, quantitative, and computationally-intensive), and design-oriented research. We particularly welcome cross-disciplinary or cross-paradigmatic approaches that can generate novel insights to advance scholarly understanding and practical utility.

Track Chairs:
Yulin Fang, City University Hong Kong
Jan Recker, University of Hamburg
Susan Scott, London School of Economics
Yong Tan, University of Washington