Abstract
Digital Transformation is often considered an organisation-wide initiative depicting a holistic form of business transformation enabled by information systems (Chanias et al., 2019). Nevertheless, despite the increasing reference to academic and practitioners’ literature on investments in digital transformation, recent studies have shown that digital transformation initiatives are not always strategic orientated nor are they clearly defined (Engesmo and Panteli 2021). Findings also point to ‘digital’ as being a nebulous word and show that organizations are still in the process of learning, exploring and unpacking the opportunities of digital transformation for themselves. In doing so, they rethink their strategies, structures, role of IT department, skills and digital capabilities. Following these, we take the position that even though digital has become pervasive, organisations are still going through a process of figuring out how to diffuse digital capability and scalability in their organisation, scale up digital transformation initiatives and ultimately embrace digitalisation in their business activities. Scalability refers to “the ability of a process, network, or system to handle a growing amount of work” (Moro Visconti and Morea, 2020). Recent research highlighted the implications of digital transformation on managing people and teams involved in the innovation process and the development of new products and services (Verhoef et al., 2021). Scalability of digital transformation can affect various stages of the innovation process in ways that are complex and causally ambiguous, due to the vast array of enabling technologies, their impact of how teams work (Feliciano-Cestero et al., 2023), and the multiple ways in which they can “augment” product and service performance (Ameen et al., 2022).
The aim of the current project is to examine the process that organisations go through in order to achieve scalability in their attempt to embrace digital transformation, the challenges associated with this process, and how this affects new product and service development. In particular, we are interested in understanding how a large organisation approaches digital transformation and identify the specific mechanisms that are adopted for the purpose of scalability; and how this affects how they manage innovation processes.