Research Commentary —The New Organizing Logic of Digital Innovation: An Agenda for Information Systems Research

On a hardware level, complementors can leverage device-specific components supplied by the platform provider, such as the camera module or sensors of a mobile device.

“On a hardware level, complementors can leverage device-specific components supplied by the platform provider, such as the camera module or sensors of a mobile device (Yoo et al., 2010).”

Digital resources can be edited and reprogrammed, and their functionality can be deferred until the point of use.

“At a time when digital resources are readily editable (Kallinikos et al. 2013), reprogrammable (Yoo et al. 2010), and functionality can be procrastinated until the point of use (Eaton et al. 2015;Henfridsson et al. 2014)”

Innovation fundamentally involves recombination, and new products and services emerge from combining components in novel ways.

“Recombination is at the heart of innovation.”

Use is no longer bounded by predefined products; instead, it involves digital resources that combine from the ground up.

“Consider that use is no longer defined by products with clear and pre-defined boundaries (Yoo et al. 2010), but hosts digital resources that come together and assemble a whole from the ground-up (cf. DeLanda 2006).”

Firms can increase the number of possible value paths by expanding horizontally across the layers of digital technology.

“Firms are essentially able to expand the number of possible value paths in innovation, not least by expanding their reach horizontally along the layers of digital technology (cf.Yoo et al. 2010).”

The value of a digital innovation is not fixed by its original designer and extends beyond the initial offering.

“Yet, the value of the digital innovation is not pre-determined by the original designer but extends beyond the initial proposition (Tilson et al. 2010;Wareham et al. 2014;Yoo et al. 2010).”

Digital resources are product-agnostic, meaning their significance in use is largely determined by their relations to other resources.

“Digital resources are agnostic in the sense that their meaning in the use situation is largely defined by their relationships to other resources.”

Value spaces correspond to four loosely coupled layers of digital architecture: contents, service, networks, and device.

“As outlined in Figure 1, these spaces map onto the four loosely coupled layers of digital architecture (Benkler 2006;Yoo et al. 2010), namely: contents, service, networks, and device.”

Using digital resources rather than products or services allows finer-grained study of value creation and capture in digital innovation.

“Instead of notions such as products (Yoo et al. 2010) or services (Barrett et al. 2015;Lusch and Nambisan 2015), the notion of digital resources increases the granularity by which the creation and capture of value can be studied in digital innovation.”

A digital resource can be part of many users' different value paths.

“In particular, it accommodates the fact that a particular digital resource (”

Value scope indicates how agnostic a digital resource is and its potential to expand into different functional areas.

“This will indicate both the digital resource's degree of agnosticism (Yoo et al. 2010), and its potential to branch out into different functional areas.”

The research direction complements existing thinking on massive recombination and resource integration.

“The research direction posed by this research commentary complements existing thinking on massive recombination (Flath et al. 2017;Yoo et al. 2010;Yoo et al. 2012) and resource integration (e.g.Lusch and Nambisan 2015).”