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Digital Innovation

Digital innovation refers to the design and implementation of novel and original products, services, processes, and business models, where the innovation process, its outcomes, or the subsequent organizational and social transformation are embodied in or enabled by digital technologies.

We are particularly interested in key contemporary technologies that move beyond representational purposes, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things technologies, and platform-based ecosystems.

Key questions include:

  • How are digital innovations developed and implemented?
  • How do digital technologies change the organization of work?
  • How do digital technologies interact to create increasingly complex ecosystems?
  • How should the information systems field formulate prescriptive knowledge to help organizations design and implement digital innovations?

Selected Projects

Digital Capital Creation

The project studies the role of digital technologies in creating and transforming different types of capital.

Capital creation is the enduring goal for all organizations. All are concerned with creating a mix of one or more types of capital: economic, human, organizational, natural, social, and symbolic. All need to focus on raising their capital productivity to a level greater than their industry competitors if they are to remain viable. While most organizations and governments implicitly recognize that they have a key role in capital creation, they typically do not explicitly state this role:

  • Organizations must understand their capital mix and how they transform one type of capital into other types.
  • Policy makers must understand how their policies create particular types of capital and make the connection between these actions and societal capital creation.

For more than half a century, digitization has been the major facilitator for improving capital productivity at all levels, individual to international. Much capital is now in digital forms, such as the Internet, and capital creation processes are frequently digital, such as the sharing economy. Yet, there is little understanding of how governments can influence digital capital creation for the economic, ecological, and social benefit of their organizations and citizens:

  • What are the key mechanisms to support digital capital creation at the level of organizations and governments?
  • What are the main actors and elements that play important roles in the process of digital capital creation?

 

Designing with Autonomous Tools

In this project, we study how autonomous design tools change the nature of work.

Autonomous, intelligent tools are reshaping work practices across industries, including innovative design work. These tools generate outcomes with little or no user intervention and produce designs of unprecedented complexity and originality. Key application areas include the design of user interfaces, semiconductor chips, and video games.

This development has been fueled by the increased use of AI techniques, such as machine learning or genetic algorithms—techniques that have been evolving for decades in the AI community but have only recently put to more widespread and productive use in organizational settings. The increased deployment of such autonomous design tools has been fueled by effective access to large swaths of data and computing power enabled by the emergence of broadband networks, sensor technologies, cloud-based computing, and platform induced ecosystems.

 

Selected Publications

Gregor, S., Chandra Kruse, L., & Seidel, S. (2020). The Anatomy of a Design Principle. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 21(6), 1622-1652.

Berente, N., Seidel, S., & Safadi, H. (2019). Research Commentary - Data-Driven Computationally-Intensive Theory Development. Information Systems Research (ISR), 30(1), 50-64.

Lehrer, C., Wieneke, A., vom Brocke, J., Jung, R., & Seidel, S. (2018). How Big Data Analytics Enables Service Innovation: Materiality, Affordance, and the Individualization of Service. Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), 35(2), 424-460.

Seidel, S., Berente, N., Lindberg, A., Lyytinen, K., & Nickerson, J. (2019). Autonomous Tools and Design: A Triple-Loop Approach to Human-Machine Learning. Communications of the ACM, 62(1), 50-57.

Seidel, S., Recker, J., & vom Brocke, J. (2013). Sensemaking and Sustainable Practicing: Functional Affordances of Information Systems in Green Transformations. Management Information Systems Quarterly (MIS Quarterly), 37(4), 1275-1299

Werder, K., Seidel, S., Recker, J., Berente, N., Gibbs, J., Abboud, N., & Benzeghadi, Y. (2020). Data-Driven, Data-Informed, Data-Augmented: How Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Wildlands Live Unit Uses Data for Continuous Product Innovation. California Management Review, 62(3).