Authors:
Kris Ven
;
Benazeer Shahzada
and
Jan Verelst
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Modularity, Knowledge, Absorptive capacity, Outsourcing, Agility.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Business and Social Applications
;
Case Studies and Innovative Applications for Smart(Er) Cities
;
e-Business
;
Energy and Economy
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Innovative Business Models
;
Smart Cities
Abstract:
The ability to innovate is of increasing importance for organizations to increase their competitiveness. Since organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology (IT) to support their operations, IT nowadays plays a crucial role in stimulating innovation in organizations. It has also been shown that IT offers opportunities to organizations to increase their agility. In this paper, we argue that in order for organizations to innovate with IT, design parameters are needed which can be governed by organizations. Our focus in this paper is on how modularity and knowledge can be used as design parameters. Although the importance of knowledge has been widely acknowledged in literature, organizational modularity has received far less attention. We will demonstrate that attention to both design parameters is essential to innovate with IT. We focus hereby on an application within the context of IT outsourcing. We provide a framework that has a strong theoretical found
ation which illustrates how the concepts of modularity, knowledge, outsourcing, agility, and innovation are related to each other.
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