Organising digital innovation in ERP platforms

Abstract

Recently, established enterprise technology vendors (such as Oracle and SAP) have been remaking their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as ‘platforms’ that herald in new technologies capable of transforming mainstream organising logics and, apparently, making organisations ‘intelligent.’ However, scholars studying digital platforms are yet to capture this change. The literature has discussed how digital platforms are transforming the way organisations innovate and compete but, thus far, studies have developed a rather partial understanding of digital platforms and their role in digital innovation. The bulk of the literature seems to focus mostly on consumer-oriented platforms (e.g., Apple and Google) in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, thus leaving the important nuances of innovation dynamics surrounding the building of enterprise platforms unexplored as well as their potential for reshaping organisations. Combining Information Systems (IS) perspective with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this thesis offers a sociotechnical, longitudinal, multi-perspective and multi-spatial approach, which contrasts with the narrow, snapshot studies that portray digital innovation as a technology-oriented phenomenon from a singular vantage point in time and space. Drawing on qualitative data, the research includes three empirical studies, each with a different perspective – the digital platform, the platform ecosystem and the platform markets – that depict struggles, asymmetries and challenges in the relationship between a global ERP vendor and multiple actors participating in innovation development and adoption. Together, these studies present a deeper understanding of how a major digital innovation emerges and unfolds and what complexities are involved in this trajectory; how third-party innovation is orchestrated and what processes and mechanisms constitute this orchestration; and how innovation visions are created and shaped, highlighting details of the sociotechnical arrangements that connect actors, processes and artefacts towards innovation adoption. Answering demands for a holistic approach in digital platform studies, this thesis’ main contribution is to articulate a comprehensive view of how digital innovation is organised in ERP platforms. This research enhances digital innovation knowledge in three aspects. First, it advances the understanding of digital innovation processes. While the extant platform literature studies isolated processes, this study brings an investigation of their simultaneous occurrence, providing different insights about their dynamics. Second, this thesis goes a step further in the comprehension of innovation coordination. Scholars have described several mechanisms that are put in place to orchestrate third-party innovation, and this investigation builds on them to show how the orchestration occurs. Finally, this research draws attention to a different aspect of innovation adoption. The digital platform literature has not looked at the antecedents of innovation adoption, i.e., innovation visions, which here are depicted in detail from their emergence to their articulation in the market.