TY - JOUR
T1 - Framing innovation opportunities while staying committed to an organizational epistemic stance
AU - Fayard, Anne Laure
AU - Gkeredakis, Emmanouil
AU - Levina, Natalia
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to the National Science Foundation for funding under NSF VOSS [Grant 1122381]. The authors wish to thank especially the senior editor, the associate editor, and the entire review team as well as seminar participants at Warwick Business School and New York University, the fifth International Process Symposium (2013), ISR Special Issue Workshop held at New York University, Stern School of Business (2013), and Academy of Management meeting, OCIS division (2014). The authors are also thankful to the following individuals, who gave feedback to various versions of the manuscript: Beth Bechky, Daniel Shlagwein, Darrell Rowbottom, Davide Nicolini, and Michael Barrett. Last but certainly not least, the authors wish to thank the participants in this research, who gave up their limited free time and welcomed them into their organization with such generosity.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 INFORMS.
PY - 2016/6/1
Y1 - 2016/6/1
N2 - This paper examines how an organization's culture, and in particular its stance toward the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, matters when confronting new digitally enabled practices for generating novel insights. We draw on an in-depth interpretive study of how two innovation consulting firms encountered crowdsourcing for innovation. Our findings suggest that, although both organizations relied on a similar set of organizational arrangements in their daily consulting work, they enacted different positions vis-à-vis crowdsourcing: one firm further experimented with it, whereas the other rejected it altogether. These different positions emerged as organizational actors examined, framed, and evaluated crowdsourcing as an alternative for generating knowledge. To interpret these findings, we draw on philosophy of science and develop the concept of organizational epistemic stance, defined as an attitude that organizational actors collectively enact in pursuing knowledge. Our analysis suggests that when organizational actors encounter and explore information technology-enabled practices, such as crowdsourcing and big data analytics, they are likely to remain committed to their epistemic stance to frame such practices and judge their potential value for pursuing knowledge. This paper contributes to our understanding of encounters with, and adoption and diffusion of, new organizational practices and offers new ways of thinking about crowdsourcing.
AB - This paper examines how an organization's culture, and in particular its stance toward the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, matters when confronting new digitally enabled practices for generating novel insights. We draw on an in-depth interpretive study of how two innovation consulting firms encountered crowdsourcing for innovation. Our findings suggest that, although both organizations relied on a similar set of organizational arrangements in their daily consulting work, they enacted different positions vis-à-vis crowdsourcing: one firm further experimented with it, whereas the other rejected it altogether. These different positions emerged as organizational actors examined, framed, and evaluated crowdsourcing as an alternative for generating knowledge. To interpret these findings, we draw on philosophy of science and develop the concept of organizational epistemic stance, defined as an attitude that organizational actors collectively enact in pursuing knowledge. Our analysis suggests that when organizational actors encounter and explore information technology-enabled practices, such as crowdsourcing and big data analytics, they are likely to remain committed to their epistemic stance to frame such practices and judge their potential value for pursuing knowledge. This paper contributes to our understanding of encounters with, and adoption and diffusion of, new organizational practices and offers new ways of thinking about crowdsourcing.
KW - Crowdsourcing
KW - Epistemic stance
KW - IT innovation adoption
KW - Innovation
KW - Interpretive research
KW - Knowledge creation
KW - Organizational culture
KW - Philosophy of science
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U2 - 10.1287/isre.2016.0623
DO - 10.1287/isre.2016.0623
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84976871592
SN - 1047-7047
VL - 27
SP - 302
EP - 323
JO - Information Systems Research
JF - Information Systems Research
IS - 2
ER -