Shifting and Shaping: Physicality in Digital Innovation

As digital innovation has become pervasive in almost all aspects of our life, we often come to understand it as a realm of frictionless and unbounded opportunity. However, digital innovation does not occur in isolation but in the context of a world that is not just digital – in fact our world is inherently physical. Both, practitioners and researchers of digital innovation must confront this physicality to face the emerging challenges of digital innovation. The current literature on digital innovation has a limited understanding of physicality in digital innovation as it predominantly focuses on the uniquely digital characteristics of digital innovation. As a result, physicality is often treated as a unidirectional constraint, rather than an essential component to understanding digital innovation.
This dissertation takes the opportunity to contribute to this field of knowledge and expand our understanding of digital innovation by providing a systematic conceptualization of physicality, as well as a language of physicality that is needed to reveal the nuances of how digital innovation interacts with the physical world. To build this conceptualization the dissertation draws on the notion of boundaries. By observing both how boundaries of physicality occur and are affected by digital innovation, as well as, examining how boundaries are perceived and can be acted upon, the project contributes to a holistic socio-technical understanding of digital innovation. Utilizing the empirical context of sports and sports technologies this dissertation builds on the theoretical findings from four individual research papers.
The findings of this dissertation contribute to the knowledge on digital innovation by 1) establishing a systematic language of physicality as an important component in digital innovation, and 2) by proposing boundaries as a theoretical lens to analyse the physicality in digital innovation to reveal how physical boundaries are affected by digital innovation in surprising and unexpected ways. The dissertation further discusses how 3) structures of use can guide the shaping of boundaries as strategic tools in shaping collective action towards desired change, and 4) the dissertation discusses two notions of physicality that are distinct in referring to either the operational necessity or contextual intention. Overall, this dissertation on the one hand highlights why the study of physicality in digital innovation is necessary as it reveals new and unexpected insights into digital innovation and on the other hand provides a conceptualization and language of physicality it builds a foundation for studying physicality further.