PhD defence A. (Ainara) Novales Uriarte

The advancements in information technologies (IT) and the ensuing increasing popularity of IT-enriched digitized products have radically transformed the way organizations generate value with their products and offerings. The limitless recombination of digitized products’ unique attributes (e.g., connectivity, re-programmability) affords novel potentials for  innovation and value creation and provides digitized products with a generative trait, as producers and actors continue to add and/or change digitized products’ functionality. This generative trait challenges the assumptions of prior studies on innovation management regarding the boundaries and centralized agency of innovation. 

In the last couple of decades, affordance theory and generativity theory have become increasingly popular lenses in IS research to investigate the transformative character of digital technologies and their generative potentials. Affordance theory allows IS researchers to study how a technology is repurposed by investigating the action potentials that it offers actors based on their goals, the material properties of the technology, and the use context. Generativity theory allows IS researchers to investigate the innovation trajectory of an IT by exploring the uses of the technology as it produces unprompted changes. Taking a socio-technical view and using affordances and generativity as theoretical lenses, this dissertation explores how firms leverage the generative capacity of their digitized products to generate value from their digitized products’ potentials (i.e., affordances).

The PhD defences will not take place publicly in the usual way. A live stream link has been provided to candidate. The ceremony will begin exactly at 13.00.