Along the Currents of Digital Innovation: Mapping Flows across Rhizomatic Digital Innovation Ecosystems

Digital innovation ecosystems (DIEs) are typically conceptualized as core-periphery arrangements coordinated through centralized platforms and keystone firms. Yet contemporary ecosystems increasingly emerge around tech verticals (e.g., HealthTech, FinTech, and GreenTech) that lack a clear architectural core. This dissertation extends the platform-centric assumptions by reconceptualizing these arrangements as rhizomatic digital innovation ecosystems (rhizomatic DIEs).
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s New Materialist ontology and the emerging flow-oriented perspective in IS, the dissertation develops a flow-oriented perspective to understand how innovation unfolds without a central orchestrating platform. Methodologically, the dissertation employs Situational Analysis to map the heterogeneous elements, relations, and arenas that compose a single, in-depth case study of a digital venture studio engaged in digital health innovation. Through an extensive corpus of participant observations, interviews, and documents, the study identifies three constitutive flows: (1) vital flows - material phenomena of lived environments that innovation attunes to, captures, and re-patterns, (2) trace flows - selective inscriptions that render phenomena mobile, comparable, and recombinable, and (3) axiomatic flows - codifications that stabilize meaning and action. The dissertation shows that rhizomatic DIEs form and evolve through the dynamic interweaving across these three flows. The core contribution presents seven correspondence dynamics: weaving, diverging, horizoning, liminalizing, condensing, axiomatizing, and temporalizing. Together, these dynamics provide a framework for understanding how ecosystems evolve through distributed and contingent flows.
This paper-based dissertation comprises four papers that all develop a flow-based understanding of digital innovation and entrepreneurship. The first paper explores the role of digital technology in digital entrepreneurship by problematizing the foundational assumptions underlying research into New Venture Creation (NVC). By showing that actor-centric assumptions limit our ability to understand temporal phenomena in entrepreneurial timing, the paper contributes an alternative, flow-oriented assumption base and charts future research in this direction. The second paper develops a rhizomatic process view of innovation in ecosystems that lack a coordinating core. The third paper explores how digital ventures territorialize and code fluid, embodied phenomena. It contributes to the conceptualization of long and short-term data plays, namely how data is mobilized to transform immediate interactions with phenomena and how they are societally construed. The fourth and final paper of the dissertation explores how Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage thinking can help study scalar phenomena that go beyond any bounded locality or temporality.
By integrating Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy with digital innovation research, this dissertation contributes (1) a novel ontological framing of digital innovation ecosystems as coreless and processual, (2) a methodological contribution through the articulation of Situational Analysis as a means to study rhizomatic digital innovation ecosystems, and (3) a theoretical vocabulary for analysing correspondence dynamics in digital innovation.