The Tables Have Turned: How Can the Information Systems Field Contribute to Technology and Innovation Management Research?

Pervasive digitalization has brought new disruptive changes in the economy. At the core of these disruptive changes is digitally enabled generativity. In this paper, I argue that scholars must offer new theoretical models and insights that guide management practices in the age of generativity that can extend, or perhaps supplant, the prevailing emphasis on modularity. To that end, I suggest that information systems scholars must attend explicitly to the generative materiality of digital artifacts by drawing on the sociomaterial perspective, which has emerged as a robust intellectual tradition of the IS community. This paper is a provocation for those IS scholars who are willing to stretch the boundaries of their intellectual imagination beyond the comfort of IS journals and conferences, and offers a promising path forward.