Track Chairs
United Kingdom
California
Sydney
Description
With the unrelenting pace of digital innovation and the infiltration of digital technologies into every aspect of our society, our work, and our lives, we are faced with many new dilemmas, new questions, new uncertainties, that such innovations bring. As a result, the IS community is finding itself at several crossroads. We are now living in a world deeply infused with and shaped by digital technology, yet many of our core perspectives and theories derive from a time when computers were new and alien to the world. By the same token, previously distinct intellectual disciplines are converging and different directions forward are becoming available. Faced with new challenges of a world infused with digital technology, taking the paths forward will bring the discipline to new and unchartered territory. Tensions will occur along crossroads of academia and industry, different geographic regions, varying research traditions, open and proprietary modes of knowledge generation enterprise and consumer technologies, new realities and established theories, and the economic and social responsibilities. This track aims to provide a forum to raise these questions and debate the unfamiliar possibilities ahead as we collectively seek clarity at these crossroads of our digital innovation journey.
Digital Innovation should be distinguished from more traditional innovation associated with the delivery or organizational involvement of IT. We view digital innovation as having broader scope than IT innovation, being associated with pervasive, occasionally light-weight technologies whose diffusion across the social fabric cuts across the boundaries of established institutional domains and fields of social practice (examples are smartphones, Web 2.0 technologies, social media, wearable devices etc). As the conference theme track, digital innovation at a crossroads recounts the experience of the traditional Irish melting-post of the crossroads, where Irish people gathered to converse, reflect, empathize and celebrate, thereby bringing disparate groups together.
In this light, this track invites papers that exemplify a crossroad issue, that is, an issue which brings together disparate perspectives. These perspectives to be brought together should be from different academic disciplines, different research traditions, or conflicting assumptions or views about an issue. We seek to have scholarly papers taking on the big issues outlined above – not as reflections or critiques or meta-analyses or reviews or citation counts or lists of digital technologies. Moreover, if a paper prepared by a scholar can be placed in other tracks (such as Track 18 – Social Media and Digital Collaboration, and Track 19- Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding and Sharing Economy), the paper should be sent there. Instead, we seek to challenge our colleagues to submit crossroads-type papers that transform the manner in which digital innovation is studied. Such crossroads papers should consider new ways of conceptualizing and then acting upon the digital innovation environment. As a crossroads paper, there should be seemingly disparate and diverging views brought together. The paper should be replete with research-oriented examples to justify its logical arguments. Such examples could come from previously published cases that have been reinterpreted, qualitative anecdotes derived from interviews, or quantitative data obtained as part of a big data scrape. The paper should make the case that it is transformative, either by offering (and testing if possible) propositions that have not been suggested previously, or offering innovative “melting pot” explanations of digitally-enabled events.
Topics of Interest
We have no particular bent on the specific issue or topic addressed by submissions, as long as a paper is associated with Digital Innovation at a Crossroads. We invite papers utilizing a diverse range of research approaches, and welcome controversial and well-argued papers that challenge established positions. In sum, we seek no less than new ways to transform our understanding of digital innovation.
Associate Editors
- Aleksi Aaltonen, Warwick Business School, Warwick University, UK
- Roman Beck, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Ole Hanseth, University of Oslo, Norway
- Niall Hayes, Lancaster University, UK
- Jonny Holmström, Umea University, Sweden
- Giovan Francesco Lanzara, University of Bologna, Italy
- Attila Marton, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- Jochen Runde, Cambridge University, UK
- Ping Wang, University of Maryland, USA
- Omar El Sawy, U. of Southern California, USA
- Kalle Lyytinen, CASE Western Reserve University, USA
- Jonathan Wareham, University of Barcelona, Spain
- Marcel Bogers, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Luca Giustiniano, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli, Italy
- Gerhard Schwabe, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- Petri Hallikainen, University of Sydney, Australia
- Stefan Schellhammer, University of Muenster, Germany
- Stefan Klein, University of Muenster, Germany
- Matti Mäntymäki, University of Turku, Finland
- Mathias Klier, Ulm University, Germany
- Dongming Xu, University of Queensland, Australia
- Nelson Granados, Pepperdine U., USA
