Digital Infrastructure: A Service-dominant Logic Perspective

Owing to the rapid and unrelenting digitalization of business ecosystems, digital infra-structure—as a new information technology artifact to conceptualize and realize inter-connected information system collectives—has drawn considerable attention in infor-mation systems research. Building on the extant body of knowledge, this study synthe-sizes and integrates existing discourses into a theoretical framework to contribute to the conceptualization of and to prospective theorizations on digital infrastructure. This the-oretical framework follows distinctive assumptions of service-dominant logic to business ecosystems and accounts for socio-technical complexity of digital infrastructure to even-tually derive six theoretical foundations of digital infrastructure. While three foundations (i.e., structural integrity, structural elasticity, and ambidexterity) reflect fundamental bases of digital infrastructure, the other three foundations (i.e., connectivity, generativ-ity, and modularity) reflect underlying mechanisms that cause and shape digital infra-structure’s fundamental bases. These insights represent an overall study’s first step whose next steps and the expected outcomes are also discussed.