Conferences & workshops

The event was organised by Magnus Mähring (magnus.mä[email protected]),Anna Essén ([email protected]), of House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics, and Michael Barrett ([email protected]), of Cambridge Digital Innovation at the University of Cambridge. Geoffrey Parker, Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College, a renowned thought leader on digital platforms, opened the workshop. His talk on adapting business and operating models to deal with disruption was followed by Jan Abrahamsson, Vice President and Head of Strategic Customer Engagement at Ericsson, that discussed the emergence of cross-sectoral ecosystems as a system of systems. On the second day of the conference, Eivor Oborn, Professor of Healthcare Management at the University of Warwick, shared her keynote titled ‘Responding to the Crisis: Accelerating the Integration of Innovation Ecosystems’ followed by Rebecka Cedering Ångström, Senior Researcher, Consumer and Industry Lab for Ericsson, who gave her keynote on ‘AI adoption in organisations; the path to constant change’.

During workshop breakout sessions, researchers shared their early work to groups of delegates, followed by a facilitated session to discuss, debate and propose ideas to further develop the research. The workshop was lively, interactive, and ultimately, productive. Professor Barrett said after the conference:

“The workshop was terrific. We were all inspired in sharing and building ideas together as to how digital innovation may be used in responding to the current crisis. A truly Nordic culture pervaded the workshop allowing junior and senior researchers to collaborate together to meet the grand challenges of our times.

The organisers would like to thank House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics, the Swedish Centre for Digital Innovation (SCDI), and Cambridge Digital Innovation (CDI, based at Hughes Hall and Cambridge Judge Business School) for their support. They would also like to express their gratitude to fellow scholars who helped push the boundaries of thinking towards life-changing concepts on digital innovation.

This year’s thematic track aims at bringing together scholars to develop in-depth and nuanced understandings on the ongoing changes in organising brought about by digital technologies and digitalisation. Organisers encourage process-based perspectives that will help theorise these new phenomena and welcome diverse (eg conceptual, empirical, and methodological) papers that can enhance our knowledge of topics that include but are not limited to the following:

1. Transitioning organisational forms and processes
   Digital practices are reshaping work and organisation functions and thus requiring organisational transitions. How do digitalisation processes happen? How can digital practices reshape organisational functions and boundaries? Moreover, the nature, scale, and scope of organisational partnerships has been drastically affected by the rise of platforms in which two types of parties meet and exchange. How does innovation travel in platforms and how are relationships among diverse parties established and transformed? How is boundary work redefined in such changing environments?
2. Reconceptualising work and workers when digital platforms, AI, and algorithms are multiplying
   In organisational environments where the reliance upon sophisticated algorithms increases and AI applications become more prevalent, who does the work and how does this shift? The distinction between human and technological work blurs, which requires workers, managers, and organisations to adjust. How can we make sense of the growing use of digital platforms and algorithms in organisations? How can we reconceptualise human agency and socio-technical processes as these transformations take place? How might traditional bureaucratic organisations cope with external collaborators and co-producers outside organisational boundaries, and what might be some key implications for administrative practices, organisational routines, and organisational identity?
3. New spaces of work and innovation
   The last few years have seen the proliferations of new spaces dedicated to work and collaboration be they physical (eg innovation labs, co-working spaces) and/or virtual (eg crowdsourcing communities, online communities) that have greatly affected innovating processes. How do these new spaces of work and innovation emerge and how are they nurtured? Do they necessarily enable open and free exchanges of knowledge and ideas among participants? How do innovation processes unfold virtually and/or physically through these new spaces?
4. Intended and unintended consequences for workers of organising in the digital age
   New forms of work have provided flexibility for organisations as well as workers. They have also come with ambivalent trends towards both inclusiveness and exclusion. The expectations of flexible work practices and the associated potentials for uncertainty can come with unanticipated consequences for workers. How do workers react to the expectation of ongoing change and increasingly flexible work practices? How do workers perceive these new ways of working and organising? How are their career paths affected as new careers emerge on the digital landscape?
5. Multi-level process perspectives and collective action
   The widespread availability of digital technologies has impacted organising at all levels, from institutional and competitive dynamics, to firms, to organisation behaviour. Grass-root mobilisation enables the emergence of new social movements (eg Occupy). How is this made possible? How might organising in the digital age be understood by considering multiple and inter-related levels? How may digital practices scale up (or not) and reshape work and organisational functions?
6. Methodology and ethics of research
   The growing use of digital technologies has also opened new possibilities to collect data (eg digital trace data) and to develop empirical analyses (eg netnographies, innovative social network analyses) that can be particularly illuminating for process researchers. At the same time, this unprecedented access to new data and methods leads to unprecedented ethical and epistemological questions for researchers. How could researchers design original methods that are respectful of people and the phenomena they investigate? How do we redefine human and process research in an age of unmatched access to data and of heightened responsibility for researchers?

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