Designing Digital Resourcing

Abstract

Digital innovation has become imperative for organizational survival and is increasingly contributing to the growth of national wealth. A central element of digital innovation, brought into light in this dissertation, is digital resourc-ing. Digital resourcing refers to actions managing digital resources in the dis-covery stage of the digital innovation process. The increased awareness of ef-ficient resource management has spurred organizations to search for opera-tional digital resourcing systems that can support their innovation effort. How-ever, there is a lack of existing purposeful digital resourcing systems corre-sponding to the contemporary ideals serving the requirements of practitioners. This is problematic because it hampers human actors in service ecosystems from mobilizing, decoupling, and pairing digital resources that can leverage sustainable competitive advantages. The problem addressed has provided the momentum to concentrate the research effort into one single research question: How should digital resourcing systems be designed to spur the discovery of digital innovations? Consequently, the purpose of this study has been to iden-tify design knowledge supporting the development of digital resourcing sys-tems, and, to provide an operational digital resourcing system supporting or-ganizations in the discovery stage of the digital innovation process. The main theoretical contribution corresponds to three abstraction levels of design knowledge: 1) an operational web-based digital resourcing system, 2) design principles, and finally, 3) an IS design theory for digital resourcing. The results show that the design knowledge works, provides utility for its purpose, helps to solve the problem, and is correct.