Decelerated IT Innovation: Negotiating Global IT Innovation Initiatives in Local Settings

Abstract

We examine an attempt to implement a joint IT infrastructure between a large multi-national high-technology manufacturing firm and a large mining firm. We identify several occasions where innovation failed and the manufacturing firm could not establish a new network of partnerships with their customers enabled by the introduced IT capabilities. Our study highlights a change in the forms of materiality within used control system technology - a shift from controlling isolated manufacturing devices into controlling networks of smart devices connected by Internet computing. While the new networked and ubiquitous computing infrastructure holds a potential for radical service innovation, this potential has not been fulfilled. One of the factors accounting for the failure is that the global IT innovation strategy was not well aligned to the local context and existing networks of actors. To explain this unfolding of events we coin the term decelerated innovation.