AIS SIG DITE Digital Research Seminar Series

We offer a digital seminar series as a forum for the members of SIGDITE and interested fellow scholars to exchange latest research ideas, update the community about breakthrough papers, and get feedback about work-in-progress.

Principally, seminars will be held on the first Wednesday or Thursday of every month from 3-4:30 pm CET unless noted otherwise. The seminar takes place digitally via Zoom.

If you would like to sign up to receive our calendar invite and announcements regarding the SIG DITE seminar, please use the following Google form.

If you are interested in presenting at the seminar, please send an email to Nicolai Fabian (n.e.fabian@rug.nl) or Katharina Drechsler (drechsler@wiso.uni-koeln.de).

Currently planned talks can be found below (note that speakers, topics, and schedule may change on short notice).

2024

Date	Speaker	Title	Description
Jan. 11, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Sabine Brunswicker (Purdue University)	The Impact of Empathy in Conversational AI: A Controlled Experiment with a Legal Chatbot	The rise of ChatGPT has revealed the potential of chatbots and other conversational AI tools to assist humans in fields such as law and healthcare, where the best human experts can engage in empathetic conversations. Our research aims to develop and empirically test a theory of empathy in the language displayed by conversational AI, explaining the relational outcomes of human-AI conversations in terms of cognitive effort, helpfulness, and trustworthiness. Using this theory, a chatbot is designed using syntactic and rhetorical linguistic elements that evoke empathy when providing legal services to tenants renting property. Through a randomized controlled experiment with a 2 by 3 factorial design, the effects of this empathetic chatbot on three relational outcomes in human-AI conversations are examined and compared to a non-empathetic chatbot that maintains the same logic. A baseline model utilizing non-conversational access to legal services via frequently asked questions ("FAQs") is also implemented, and the subjects' emotional state (anger) is manipulated as a moderating factor. The study involves 277 participants randomly assigned to one of six groups. The findings demonstrate the significance of both main and interaction effects on trustworthiness, usefulness, and cognitive effort. The results indicate that subtle changes in language syntax and style can have substantial implications for the outcomes of human-AI conversations. These findings contribute to the growing literature on conversational AI and have practical implications for the design of conversational and generative AI.
Feb 8, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Eleu Ellinger (Stockholm School of Economics)	Skin the the Game: The Transformational Potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations	Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) – collectively owned human-machine systems deployed on a blockchain that self-govern through smart contracts and the voluntary contributions of autonomous community members – exhibit potential to facilitate collective action in managing digital commons. Yet, the promise of decentralization and collective action is difficult to sustain. To this end, this paper critically examines the transformational potential of DAOs in the case of decentralized finance. Using a polycentric governance lens, we contribute to the literature on technology-enabled forms of organizing with a model explaining the transformational potential of DAOs to facilitate collective action in digital commons. Our study highlights that (1) DAOs are a new form of organizing enabled by blockchain technology in which individuals are free to pursue their objectives within a general system of rules enforced by smart contracts, (2) collective action for managing digital commons can be sustained through a set of three mechanisms – sustained participation, collective direction, and scaled organizing, and (3) DAOs tend to strike a balance between centralized and fully decentralized or community-based governance by implementing a polycentric governance system involving a combination of human and machine agency that creates skin in the game.
March 6, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Tobias Kircher (TU Munich)	Privacy Regulation and Learners’ Access to App-based Education – Evidence from Children’s Privacy	Policymakers contemplate completely prohibiting third-party tracking. Whether a prohibition would hinder learners’ access to app-based education has remained obscure. In general, we are still in the process of fully understanding the costs of privacy regulation, in particular potential social costs. Adverse social repercussions could change how we think of privacy regulation. There are two plausible but theoretically uncertain monetization-related reactions by app developers that would hinder learners’ access to app-based education: the erection of paywalls, which would limit the free of charge access, and the escalation of the volume among apps remaining free, which would indirectly hinder learners’ access by distracting learners and degrading the usability of education apps. We study in a difference-in-differences analysis the free access and usability consequences of Apple’s 2019 prohibition of third-party tracking in child-directed education apps. We find that the prohibition, on average, reduced the likelihood that a child-directed education app is free by 1.7 percent. We also discover that the prohibition degraded the usability of child-directed education apps remaining free of charge. The degraded usability can be attributed to the escalation of the ad volume causing distraction. Among the apps that got less usable are apps directed to learners with special educational needs. These findings push forward the frontiers of knowledge of the consequences of privacy regulation and the pricing consequences of the regulation of the digital economy and inform policymakers about the adverse social repercussions of strengthening data privacy. Firms could increase the product rating, a critical success factor, by relinquishing advertisements.
April 24, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei (TBS Education, France)	IT consumerization and the paradox between autonomy and professional self-governance in healthcare	IT consumerization has become a going concern for managers and researchers alike given that the use of consumer IT in organizational contexts has far-reaching reverberations on the organizational level. Our paper advances this discussion through emphasizing that IT consumerization in professional work in healthcare is inherently paradoxical. Our evidence shows that in these settings IT consumerization raises and interconnects professional autonomy and governance as contradictory and interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and continue over time. More specifically, we find that professional autonomy enables doctors to use personal IT devices and software that they find convenient for their work, but the widespread use of such devices also drives professionals’ efforts to govern this work through establishing professional norms that limit professional autonomy to a certain extent. Using an inductive approach, we show how professionals navigate this paradox by creating collective norms to balance digital representations' quality, but the tensions persist as IT devices evolve and different medical specialties require varying judgments. The contributions of the study include enriching the IT consumerization literature by addressing the paradox raised in decision-making among professionals.
May 2, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Gregory Vial (HEC Montréal)	A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective of Software Reuse in the Digital Age: An Agenda for IS Research	Software is instrumental to the accelerated pace of digital innovation, and our ability to rapidly develop and deliver digital products and services is largely based on the reuse of existing software. In recent years, packaged software reuse has emerged as an important phenomenon driving the creation of new software, both proprietary and open source, as well as the emergence and evolution of entire software ecosystems. Arguing that our theoretical understanding of the nature and the magnitude of current packaged software reuse practice remains limited, our objective with this research commentary is twofold. First, we draw attention to the importance of packaged software reuse and its relevance as a promising phenomenon of interest for information systems (IS) researchers. Second, we mobilize the concept of generativity to conceptualize packaged software as a form of technological innovation that fosters large-scale (re)combination and propose complex adaptive systems (CAS) as a theoretical foundation to help us engage with the current nature of the phenomenon. Using key principles of CAS as the generative foundation for our conceptual scaffolding, we offer a research framework for packaged software reuse and develop an agenda for IS research organized across three main axes. For each axis, we outline relevant research themes and research questions leveraging the nature of software as objects constituted of other pieces of software developed and maintained by heterogeneous groups of software developers. Shedding light on the renewed role of software reuse, our work contributes to ongoing conversations on generativity and software ecosystems as well as the design of digital products and services.
June 6, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Sebastian Krakowski (Stockholm School of Economics)	TBA	TBA
Sept. 4, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	David Bendig (University of Muenster)	Attention to Digital Innovation: Exploring the Impact of a Chief Information Officer in the Top Management Team	We draw on the attention-based view of the firm to examine whether and when the presence of a CIO in the TMT has a positive effect on both firms’ ideated digital innovation (IDI) (i.e., the intensity of firms’ digital patenting activity) and commercialized digital innovation (CDI) (i.e., the digital sophistication of firms’ new products). Building on the idea that attention processes are context dependent, we also explore the moderating roles of CEO characteristics (IT background and role tenure) as well as environmental characteristics (the industry’s IT attention). We analyze data from a cross-industry panel of U.S. S&P 500 firms over eight years that includes up to 2,852 firm-year observations. The results indicate that CIO presence in the TMT is positively related to a firm’s IDI and CDI. Furthermore, they show that the organizational context related to CEO characteristics moderates the CIO-CDI relationship and that the environmental context related to the industry’s IT attention moderates the CIO-IDI relationship. Our research contributes to the information systems literature by providing robust evidence that CIO presence in the TMT positively influences a firm’s digital innovation outcomes, showing how internal and external boundary conditions affect the work of CIOs, and elaborating the role of managerial attention as an underlying mechanism explaining digital innovation.
Oct. 2, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	André Hanelt	TBA	TBA
Nov. 14, 2024 3:00-4:30pm	Satish Nambisan (Case Western Reserve University)	TBA	TBA

2023

Date	Speaker	Title	Description
Feb. 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Julian Lehmann (Arizona State University)	Interfacing for Complementarity in Nascent Innovation Ecosystems	This talk reports on a longitudinal field study of an emerging 3D printing ecosystem to examine how firms create interfaces in nascent ecosystems. The insights from this study form the foundation for a novel theoretical perspective of interfacing as a dynamic learning process upon which innovation ecosystems emerge.
March 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens Institute of Technology)	Generative AI in Creative Work	Many workers in the creative professions, including game designers, graphic designers, writers, illustrators, photographers, and filmmakers have begun using Generative AI such as GPT-3, Bard, Dali, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion to create concept art for games, find angles for stories, and generate short videos. This talk considers how interaction with these types of AI might be improved, especially by augmenting language models with other technologies. One aspect of this talk focuses on the way these tools can be used in journalism, based on the development and testing of a tool that generates story angles. Another aspect of the talk is more general, and considers how data functions as a kind of material in design.
April 6, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Shi Ying LIM	When Too Much Plasticity Exists: The Perils of Digital Templating in a Nascent Digital Venture	Nascent digital ventures have to allocate scarce resources to the creation of digital products. Past research espouses the change and stability benefits of digital templates as a base design for nascent digital ventures. We present a longitudinal case study of a nascent digital health venture and reveal that a focus on the reuse of templates led to continuous cognitive and material stretching of digital templates to create derivative digital products efficiently, which enabled stability amidst change. However, these practices also created inefficiency associated with too much change and too little stability, as the plasticity of digital templates was amplified through cognitive and material stretching.
May 4, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Abayomi Baiyere and Kathryn Brohman (Queen's University)	How is Digital [X] Transforming Research and Management School Education?	Meet the incoming SIG DITE President and learn about a new study that explores the Digital X phenomenon in the context of transforming research and management education.
June 1st, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Llewellyn Thomas (IESE)	Vertical and horizontal complementarities in platform ecosystems	We develop a framework of vertical and horizontal complementarities in platform ecosystems. We distinguish between “vertical complementarity” which signifies how complements (e.g., apps) increase the value of a platform (e.g., Android) and “horizontal complementarity” which relates to the complementarities between complements on a platform (e.g., payment app and a gaming app). This distinction helps to clarify the notion of complementarities in platform ecosystems.
July 6, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Erwin Fielt (Queensland University of Technology)	Digital business model innovation	With the growing attention to digital innovation and transformation, business models have become a strategic imperative for organizations and a prominent research topic in the management and Information Systems (IS) disciples. While digital business models are often discussed in management and IS literature, they mostly lack explicit conceptualization and theorization. Moreover, the literature on digital technologies discusses specific varieties (AI- enabled business models, blockchain-enabled business models, IIoT- enabled business models, etc.) without addressing the bigger, ‘digital’ picture. In this presentation, we will first discuss different perspectives on digital business model innovation. Next, we will propose a theoretical perspective based on the notion of external enablers. Finally, we will address how digital business models and traditional business models can come together in organizations by understanding business model portfolios.
Sep. 7, 2023, 3:00-4:30pm	Joey van Angeren (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)	The Dual Face of Platform Interfaces	To enable third-party developers to produce apps on top of digital platforms, those platforms provide well-documented and standardized interfaces that grant developers access to specific platform components. Developers choose whether to leverage such platform interfaces, and we investigate the implications of this choice for their ability to produce follow-on app innovations using a monthly panel dataset of around a thousand Firefox extensions.
Oct. 5, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Hannes Rothe (ICN Business School), Abayomi Baiyere (Queen's University), Daniel Fürstenau, Matthias Schulte-Althoff, Kai Schewina (all FU Berlin)	An Extended Theory of Generativity on Digital Platforms	The assumption that generativity engenders unbounded growth has acquired an almost taken-for-granted position in information systems and management literature. We examine the relationship between generativity and user base growth in the context of a digital platform and propose an Extended Generativity Theory that presents generativity and growth in an integrative view and raises awareness about the limitations of the “unbounded growth” claim.
Nov. 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Hakan Özalp (University of Amsterdam)	Standardized Technologies, Human Capital and Employee Mobility	We study the de-facto standardization of middleware tools within the video game industry, and explore how it made human capital more general and industry specific (rather than firm-specific), which in turn increased the ability of individuals to move between companies. We contrast the impact on individuals with skills that are complementary to these technologies in comparison to those being substituted by these technologies. We find that the diffusion of middleware tools led to an increase in labor mobility on average but was associated with higher mobility for individuals with skills that complemented those tools, in comparison to those that were partly substituted by these tools.

2022

Date	Speaker	Title	Description	Link to paper (where available)
April 7, 2022	Gabe Piccoli (Louisiana State University)	Digital Strategic Initiatives	Gabriele Piccoli presents his study entitled: "Digital Strategic Initiatives and Digital Resources: Construct Definition and Future Research Directions."The authors defined Digital Strategic Initiatives (DSI) as identifiable competitive moves that depend on digital resources to create and appropriate economic value.They use the term digital deliberately, in line with the recent push for discerning the so-called IT "x” and Digital "x” phenomena.	ttps://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=4009793
May 5, 2022	Lars Mathiassen (Georgia State University), Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University), and Jan Recker (Universität Hamburg)	AIS SIGDITE Fireside Chat	In the AIS SIG DITE Fireside Chat with Kalle Lyytinen, Lars Mathiasen, and Jan Recker about the Challenges and Opportunities in DITE Research everyone in the audience can ask anything they ever wanted to know about the conduct and publication of digital innovation, transformation, and entrepreneurship research.	None
June 2, 2022	Youngjin Yoo (Case Western Reserve University)	Beyond Layered Modular Architecture: The Emerging Decentralized Digital Ecosystem and Why It Matters	Youngjin Yoo will present on a working paper he has been working on for the last months.
Sept. 1, 2022 4:30-6:00pm	Ola Henfridsson (University of Miami)	The Backend Revolution and the Digital Transformation of Institutions	Ola Henfridsson will present a current research project he is working on together with Robert Gregory.
Nov. 10, 2022 3:00-4:30pm	Brad Greenwood (George Mason University)	No news is bad news: The Internet, Corruption, and the Decline of the Fourth Estate	The newspaper industry is perhaps the most notable casualty of the rise of the digital age. In this work, we examine how the decline of local reporting capacity influences local levels of political corruption. As newspapers are an important investigative arm of local communities, it is possible that the decline of community media will embolden corrupt actors who believe they are less likely to be detected following the closure of a local newspaper. To examine these relationships, we leverage a novel dataset of federal charging documents of corruption and daily newspaper closures using a difference in difference approach. Results indicate a significant rise in federal corruption charges when major newspapers close in a federal district. Strikingly, we observe no evidence that the rise in online newsvendors is able to ameliorate this effect. This highlights the important role of the “fourth estate” in inhibiting corruption in governance.	https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3965127
Dec. 8, 2022 3:00-4:30pm	Konstantin Hopf (Bamberg University)	Data Science as Craftwork	Recent years have brought major technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and firms are expected to invest nearly $98 B in 2023. However, many AI projects never leave the pilot phase, and many companies have difficulties extracting value from their AI initiatives. To explain this contradiction, we studied more than 50 projects implementing AI in organizations. We found that organizational challenges in implementing AI projects are a result of a paradoxical tension created by two different perspectives on data science work: While data scientist engage in craft practices in all areas of their work (they not only craft products but also their tools and even their materials), managers often see data science as a mechanical activity of applying algorithms to data. Executives, managers, and data scientists should actively manage this tension to enable and sustain value creation through AI. Research should explore better approaches to effectively management AI-based information systems.