Innovation Agility: Leveraging Digital Affordance in Innovation Projects

Organizations involved in creating innovation projects are increasingly looking for approaches to attain innovation agility. The rise of digitalization has been heralded as an opportunity for organizations to achieve this. Yet, we lack understanding of the processes and mechanisms through which digitalization can be leveraged in achieving innovation agility. By drawing on the theory of technology affordance in a longitudinal study of a case company, we highlight how the application of a mundane technology can be appropriated to combat some inhibitors of innovation agility. Based on our findings, we extend the theory of technology affordance by advancing the theoretical concept of derived affordance. We further highlight digital affordance as an example of derived affordance that holds both practical and theoretical implications for our use of the technology affordance theory.