Umeå University's logo

Having secured venture capital for their startups, digital entrepreneurs face a critical transition to the postinvestment phase. They must evolve new organizational models and demonstrate their capacity to operate in the present while maintaining attention to the future. This transition unfolds in a hyperturbulent context in which rapid growth is crucial owing to competitive advantages from scale and scope. While the present-future tension has received extensive attention in other domains, we know little about how it manifests and affects digital startups transitioning into the postinvestment phase. In this article, we examine entrepreneurs’ challenges during this transition through an action research study of the interactions between a venture capital firm and a set of digital startups. We identify eight salient challenges conceptualized as transition traps, then define and validate tactics for increasing digital startups’ readiness to navigate them. We identify the main transition traps and provide actionable advice for increasing digital startups’ readiness to navigate them.

To realize their strategic goals and maintain a competitive advantage in the digital era, organizations must periodically renew their digital platforms and infrastructures. However, knowledge about such technology renewal is scattered across diverse research streams, so insights into the process are both limited and fragmented. In this article, we consolidate insights from previous research to conceptualize technology renewal as an inherently paradoxical digital transformation process that requires organizations to simultaneously remove their technological foundation and build on the practices that depend on it to implement a new technological foundation. Previous research suggests that technology renewal initiatives are driven by three paradoxical tensions: (a) established vs renewed technology usage, (b) deliberate vs emergent renewal practices and (c) inner vs outer renewal contexts. We apply this framing to a longitudinal case study in which we analyse and explain how an organization's responses to manifestations of these tensions eventually led to a vicious cycle of continued investments into two overlapping and largely incompatible digital platforms over a 9-year period. Based on these conceptual and empirical insights, we theorize technology renewal as a paradoxical, and increasingly critical, digital transformation process that forces managers to make decisions in complex and ambiguous choice situations.

Digital service platforms need to be embedded in external device platforms because they are not bundled with a proprietary device. From our analysis of the Spotify music streaming service, we have identified three strategic objectives that service platform providers need to pursue as they establish and scale their services. Achieving each objective will require trade-offs, and we described the tactics Spotify used to manage these trade-offs. We conclude by providing recommendations on how other service platform providers can apply these tactics

Research on digital platform evolution is largely focused on how platform-owners leverage boundary resources to facilitate and control contributions from external developers to extend the functional diversity and scope of a digital device. However, our knowledge of the digital platforms that carve out their existence exclusively in the service layer of industry architectures, i.e. without proprietary device connections, is limited. The concept of digital service platforms directs attention to such platforms, the role of end-users as value co-creators, and devices as requisite, but not necessarily proprietary, distribution mechanisms for service. Based on a longitudinal case study of Spotify, this paper contributes by demonstrating that digital service platform evolution is characterized by specific architectural conditions that rationalize the use of boundary resources for extending scale rather than scope, and for resourcing and controlling not only developers but also end-users as a means to strategically adjust the evolutionary process.

The organizational consequences of information technology (IT) constitutes a core focus in information systems (IS) research. The relationship between organizations and IT has received considerable attention by IS researchers in order to develop knowledge related to how and why organizations and IT are related. While organizational use of IT continues to increase in practice, previous research has shown that the effects of IT at best are difficult to predict. Consequently, the adoption and assimilation of IT in organizational settings must be recognized as complex and challenging processes, which makes the production of knowledge related to such processes important and pressing.

This dissertation identifies, characterizes and explains a paradoxical outcome of the adoption and assimilation of an enterprise content management (ECM) system in a context of organizational information management. The outcome, labeled the duplicate systems paradox, is constituted by a situation in which an organization continuously allows multiple, overlapping, partially competing and largely incompatible information systems to persist and continue to evolve over time, despite continued awareness of the adverse consequences on organizational information management capabilities. A qualitative case study approach was used as the primary means for data collection. The case study was conducted in the administrative divisions of HealthOrg, a large organization in the medical- and health care sector. To this end, the main objective of this dissertation is to investigate how this paradox was formed, and furthermore, how and why it was able to persist. In order to do this, dialectical theory is combined with contextualism and theory on organizational information processing to form a comprehensive theoretical perspective used to inform the analytical efforts.

By using a dialectical approach, the analysis presents empirical evidence of the existence and composition of three overarching contradictions found to affect the formation and persistence of the duplicate systems paradox. More specifically, the resulting explanatory model demonstrates how three pairs of opposites, control versus support at the requirements level, options versus practices at the solutions level, and top-down versus bottom-up approaches at the transformations level, along with contextual tensions, were essential components in the formation and persistence of the paradox. Thus, the duplicate systems paradox could form and continue to evolve due to contradictory forces present at, and interconnected between, different vertical and horizontal levels within the organization. Through the identification and explanation of the duplicate systems paradox, this study provides a detailed example of how, and why, unintended consequences of IT in organizations may emerge and continue over time.

In terms of implications for research and practice, the findings of this dissertation point to six important observations. First, this research suggests that understanding and characterizing the context in which IT is to be implemented is crucial and challenging. Thus, organizations should pay careful attention to the practical side of context, rather than to the somewhat theoretical boundaries of organizations. It is suggested that the concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ context may be useful in analyzing and understanding context. Second, this research suggests that organizations should attempt to identify potentially conflicting requirements, and devise clear strategies to decide how to prioritize between such requirements as the identification and explication of requirements present at different levels in the organization may reveal problems that need to be considered when choosing information system (IS). Third, organizations need to pay careful attention to what the adoption of a new IS means in terms of adaptation and/or realignment, and to what extent organizational activities, technological functionalities, or both, should be adapted. Organizations should furthermore be aware that the adoption of systems that can also be used as development platforms may cause a cascade of effects and dependencies that are difficult to manage. Fourth, the findings of this research suggest that organizations faced with the challenge of adopting complex IT solutions need to take into account their previous strategies and planned new ones in order to devise a comprehensive strategic approach since the coexistence of radically different strategies may cause uncertainty and inertia within the overall assimilation process. Fifth, this research indicates that IT management and information management (IM) are highly interrelated activities, but are not mutually exclusive. Thus, organizations adopting technologies that are specifically focused on information management may benefit from developing distinct areas of responsibility and clear communication channels between the involved organizational units. Furthermore, these findings suggest that future research should pay careful attention to, and specifically investigate, the exact nature of the relationship between information management and IT management. Finally, this research demonstrates how a dialectical approach may be used to adequately investigate organizational information management, specifically in relation to the adoption and assimilation of IT.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the role of ICT in dealing with environmental challenges facing contemporary industrial organizations. Green IS research can essentially be divided into two groups, focusing on technology per se or on providing tools that decreases environmental impact. Building on a planned research project the authors propose innovation of ICT-based services, and especially collaborative services, as useful strategies for providing firms with sense and respond capabilities in relation to environmental challenges. They also argue research that research relevance and multi-disciplinary competencies are key themes that IS researcher needs to acknowledge in order to contribute to practitioners efforts.

This paper explores the possibility of using theories and concepts from the field of environmental psychology as a framework for understanding perception of- and interaction with web pages. A qualitative pilot experiment has been conducted in order to investigate potential similarities in how people interact with, and perceive web pages and real world environments. This study indicates that perception of web pages is very similar to perception of natural environments. Many key factors that have proven to be important in perception of natural environments, such as complexity, spatial configuration and mystery, also appear to be relevant determinants in perception of web pages. Further, it also seems likely that interaction with web pages, to some extent can be described using a model based upon a conceptual framework depicting habitats selection.

We introduce Mood Devices, interactive digital media and environments designed to alter the inter-actor’s psychological state. In particular, we describe three very different virtual reality (VR) environments: Relaxation Island, the Exploratorium, and the Achievement Room, developed with our partners as part of the EMMA (Engaging Media for Mental Health) project. Relaxation Island is designed to support established relaxation techniques, as part of interventions to assist individuals cope with specific anxieties such as examination stress. The Achievement Room gives users with chronic restricted mobility the opportunity to sing and play in a virtual concert, in front of an audience of avatars programmed to respond to their performance. The aim is to provide a sense of achievement and encourage a more positive attitude. The Exploratorium, as the name suggests, takes a more user-directed approach: It provides an environment that can be explored in an embodied way, with three specific zones designed to elicited widely different moods. All three environments can be run on a range of platforms, from high-end immersive VR, to pocket-sized PDAs and web-based applications. We see such interactive media as providing an important contribution to the future of ehealth programmes.