IT, Innovation, & Social ImpactCIS 9002

Kannan Mohan

Department of CIS

Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College

Learning Objectives• How are innovation and IT related to one another?

• How can one drive the other?

• How can IT & innovation be used to positively affect societal impact?

Innovations: Incremental vs. Radical

• Incremental• Minor changes to existing products

• Exploits potential of established design

• Reinforces dominance of established firms

• Radical• Based on different set of scientific and engineering

principles

• Opens whole new markets and potential applications

• Problematic for established firms

Innovations

Core concepts

LinkagesIncremental Modular

Architectural

Discontinuous

Reinforced OverturnedU

nch

ange

dC

hanged

(Henderson and Clark, 1990)

Revolutionary levels

Evolutionary levels

IT-enabled Business Transformation

Range of potential benefits

Degre

e o

f b

usi

ness

tr

ansf

orm

ati

on

Localized exploitation

Internal integration

Business process redesign

Business network redesign

Business scope redefinition

(Venkatraman, 1994)

Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations

• Maintaining a rate of improvement

• More and more on attributes that customers already value

• Different package of attributes

• Worse performance along some dimension that is of value to customer

(Bower and Christensen, 1995)

Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations

Time

Perf

orm

ance

Disru

ptiv

e

Mainstream

(Bower and Christensen, 1995)

Open Innovation• Crowdsourcing

• IT as a platform for open innovation

• Challenges?

Links between IT & Innovation• Control & Order vs. Chaos

• Capabilities• Portfolio/program/project management

• Collaboration

• Knowledge Management

• Business-IT linkage

• Ambidexterity

• Competitive Intelligence

• Tools

• Control

IT and the BoP (Bottom of the Pyramid)