Innovating with Emerging IT in Highly Structured Environments - An Organising Vision Perspective on Blockchain and Digital Identity Wallets

This cumulative thesis explores the challenges and institutional mechanisms of innovating with emerging information technologies (IT) in highly structured environments. Emerging technologies are often difficult to implement because they arrive on the market in an immature state and with unclear use cases. To make sense of the emerging IT, members of the innovation community develop various interpretations. These are typically replete with wishful and unbalanced claims, resulting in a vibrant IT discourse that is characterized by a plethora of discursive frames and value-laden buzz words. When this discourse becomes coherent, it often leads to contagion and motivates organizations to engage with the emerging IT. Such engagement is challenging even for the most flexible organizations with innovation-friendly structures – and it can be downright daunting in highly structured environments. The latter organizations often face high structural and cultural barriers that encumber digital innovation with emerging IT. Adopting the macro-level cognitive institutional perspective of organizing vision theory, this thesis sets out to investigate how organizations in these environments can nevertheless make sense of emerging IT and materialize it in applications that create organizational value. My thesis examines the challenges of surfacing a pertinent business problematic from the organizing vision and of unpacking the technologies’ abilities and limitations. Moreover, it segues into pathways for navigating the aforementioned structural and cultural barriers. I develop four conjectures that provide practical guidelines for organizations in highly structured environments that are willing to engage with emerging IT. These insights build on 15 research papers, which are part of this thesis.