Temporal Disclosedness of Innovations - Understanding Innovation Trajectories in Information Infrastructures

The paper addresses the research question of how to analyze and evaluate innovations in complex information infrastructures. Recent studies of innovation processes involving standard-based networking technologies have called for new theoretical insights than the ones provided by traditional studies on Diffusion Of Innovations. Understanding this type of innovations becomes particularly difficult in the context of complex information infrastructures. Based on the empirical material from a case study of an IS innovation in a Norwegian hospital, the paper provides insights on temporal aspects of innovations. The paper makes two key contributions to the ongoing discussion. It introduces the concept of temporal disclosedness, which describes the tendency of innovations to disclose along the past, present, and future trajectory of the infrastracture, breaking traditional analytical and temporal boundaries. Secondly, with the help of this concept, it shows how some of the current theoretical approaches may be adequate to study the disclosedness of innovations, but their use is currently limited and hence should be extended.

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