Managing Emerging Technologies - A Socio-Technical Analysis of Opportunities and Tensions for Incumbents

Emerging technologies are changing today’s economic environment with unprecedented speed and in unpredictable ways. These dynamics threaten incumbent organizations, which are caught between continuing to effectively deliver their outcomes to existing customers and leaving established paths to leverage the opportunities afforded by emerging technologies that are still changing and developing. To address these tensions, incumbents often must implement a variety of structural and contextual changes. However, these changes strongly depend on the respective environment the incumbents are embedded in. In managing emerging technologies, incumbents thus need to understand and address a broad range of interrelated techno-organizational factors. At the same time, the increasing autonomy and intelligence of emerging technologies challenges the effectiveness of established concepts of information systems research for managing traditional information technology.
To address this gap, this thesis presents a socio-technical perspective on the management of emerging technologies that is informed by the ideas of critical realism and considers opportunities and tensions for incumbent organizations as well as their contextual embedding. First, it delves into a deeper understanding of the potentials of emerging technologies in relation to their respective context and organizational actors. In particular, the thesis focuses on two such technologies: blockchain and artificial intelligence. Second, it elaborates on how incumbents can prepare emerging technologies for effective use that lack established use cases and patterns. It explores how the techno-organizational context gives rise to a variety of interrelated mechanisms that can stimulate or constrain experimentation activities with these technologies. Moreover, this thesis investigates how incumbents prepare for effective technology use by building necessary digital capabilities and managing tensions between leveraging digital opportunities and effectively delivering outcomes despite disruption. Resolving these tensions often leads to an accumulation of digital debt, technical and informational obligations that will need to be addressed in the future. Incumbents must manage this digital debt carefully to avoid negative in the long-term.
This thesis contextualizes the contribution of seven embedded research papers and provides a holistic perspective on managing emerging technologies, contributing to a better understanding of opportunities and tensions for incumbents.