Four Roles of Physicality in Digital Innovation: A Theoretical Review

In this theoretical review, we engage with empirical contributions to digital innovation scholarship to advance our understanding of physicality. Specifically, we develop a conceptualization of physicality grounded in work on the materiality of technology involving two facets: The focus on physicality – an artifact or an activity – and the criticality of physicality when theorizing digital innovation: as a primary or secondary factor. We use this framing to describe four different roles of physicality in the digital innovation literature – physicality as subject, vessel, context, or nexus of digital innovation. Each role of physicality provides a different perspective that, independently or jointly, serves research into emergent topics along the frontier of digital innovation phenomena. This paper thus contributes by consolidating and advancing the theoretical foundation for researchers wishing to attend to varying aspects of physicality when theorizing digital innovation.