A model of coaligned digital innovations: The roles of flexible IT Infrastructure and ambidextrous IS process innovations

Digital technology is a species of information and communication technology characterized by reprogrammability, the homogenization of data, and self-referentiality. Such properties provide convergence and generativity affordances for creating multiple types of digital innovations. This study proposes a new construct “coaligned digital innovations” to capture the idea of simultaneous innovations on product, process, and business model, embodied in or enabled by digital technologies. Based on the service-dominant logic, this study posits that flexible IT infrastructure (as operand resources) can directly facilitate coaligned digital innovations or indirectly accomplish so through ambidextrous IS process innovations (operant resources). As a result, a model with three sets of research hypotheses is formulated. The potential implications are also discussed.