Envisioning entrepreneurship and digital innovation through a design science research lens: A matrix approach

Abstract

Design Science Research (DSR) in the information systems (IS) field is, at its essence, about Digital Innovation (DI). Innovative sociotechnical design artifacts involve digital information technologies (IT) being used in ways that result in profound disruptions to traditional ways of doing business and to widespread societal changes. The pervasiveness of DI means that the individuals involved in bringing it about have diverse backgrounds, including application specialists, software engineers, data scientists, business managers, economists, venture capitalists, various user groups, and entrepreneurial leaders. This range of backgrounds means that DI, much more than traditional innovation, leads to varied perspectives on the methods and tools to be used in the development of effective and evolvable complex systems incorporating digital innovations. In this paper we present a new matrix approach to DI based on DSR, entrepreneurship, and innovation theories. Clear strategic guidance allows these multiple stakeholders to make sense of the diverse landscape and to understand when and how different entrepreneurial strategies for innovation can best be applied. We define the combined DSR and DI matrix approach in terms of four strategies: invention; advancement; exaptation; and exploitation and their associated DI practices. The research contribution is a novel DSR-DI matrix process model. This model extends entrepreneurship theory as it enriches effectuation thinking with more detailed process guidance for ambidextrous entrepreneurship and it enriches DSR models for DI by showing more explicitly the different pathways corresponding to different quadrants in the knowledge-innovation matrix.