Digital innovation and organisation

At RISE we study how digitalisation affects how innovation work is organised, and how business should be organised to promote digital innovation.

Digitalisation increases the pressure for change on established organisations because of the increased rate of change in general around the world. The pressure of change affects organisations both internally and in relationships with other organisations, for example through co-creation and open innovation.

Recent research highlights four important challenges that one should focus on: leadership, market, ecosystems and digital infrastructures.

• A leadership challenge that requires new capabilities and encompasses new values such as information openness, adaptability, proactivity and the power of change.
• A market challenge that requires a deeper understanding of the strategic consequences of market positioning through digital features.
• A broader ecosystem challenge that enables new ways for organisations to interact through digital technology both internally and externally. This requires new forms of digital collaboration, processes and platforms.
• A digital infrastructure challenge where improved decision support systems, increased information availability, connected devices, big data and algorithms are changing organisational work processes and forms of collaboration.

These challenges set new requirements but also provide new opportunities for how organisations should structure their innovation work in order to meet the future. At RISE, we run a number of research projects that seek an understanding of how established companies organise themselves for digital change, and what new organisational forms can look like.