Brown Bag: Prof. Levina

Natalia Levina, Associate Professor of Information Systems, NYU Stern School of Business, USA

"Framing Innovation Opportunities While Staying Committed to an Organizational Epistemic Stance: Crowdsourcing, Data Science, and Beyond"

Abstract:

Under intensifying competitive pressures, organizations look for new ways to generate new ideas and innovation. Digital technologies such as crowdsourcing for innovation, big data analytics and enterprise social media offer new ways to source ideas and talents. Indeed, the biggest promise of emerging digital technologies is better, deeper, faster ability to generate new knowledge by, for example, getting to know better what customers want, what technological innovations the firm may be unaware of, etc. While exciting, these new technology-enabled practices are ambiguous and multifaceted, and organizations have to decide whether and how they may fit into organizational pursuit of novel, valuable insights. In framing these new opportunities, organizational actors are deliberately or inadvertently drawing on and contributing to their shared attitudes towards what knowledge is and how best to pursue it. Drawing on in-depth qualitative studies of two organizations facing an opportunity to engage with crowdsourcing for innovation, we develop a concept of organizational epistemic stance to explain a particular aspect of organizational life that matters in framing such opportunities. We argue that commitment to the organizational epistemic stance exhibited by organizations we studied represented not only an inertial force, but also a resource that allowed these organizations to sort fads from value-generating opportunities. It provided them with an ability to engage with such opportunities in the ways that were consistent with organizational practices and values.  We elaborate on how this concept can be applied to better understand in the interaction between organizational cultural universe and the wider institutional discourse about data science.

Seminar details: 

Date: September 27, 2016

Time: 12:30-14.30

Location: WEV H 326, Weinbergstrasse 56/58

About the Speaker:

Prof. Levina's main research interest is in understanding how people span organizational, professional, cultural and other boundaries in the process of building and using new technology. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods and a range of social and organizational theories in her work. She currently studies boundary spanning in the context of open innovation, crowdsourcing, and offshoring of professional services. Her research has been published in ISR, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Academy of Management Journal, Decision Sciences Journal, and other outlets. She received two dissertation awards from ICIS and the Academy of Management conferences and best paper of the track award at ICIS (2006). In 2011, she received a National Science Foundation VOSS Collaborative Grant and New York University Challenge Grant to study open innovation and crowdsourcing intermediaries. In 2007, she received the IBM SUR faculty award to study global sourcing. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellowship to investigate boundary spanning in the global IT services industry.