2023

Currently planned talks are as follows (note that speakers, topics, and schedule may change on short notice):

Date	Speaker	Title	Description
Feb. 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Julian Lehmann (Arizona State University)	Interfacing for Complementarity in Nascent Innovation Ecosystems	This talk reports on a longitudinal field study of an emerging 3D printing ecosystem to examine how firms create interfaces in nascent ecosystems. The insights from this study form the foundation for a novel theoretical perspective of interfacing as a dynamic learning process upon which innovation ecosystems emerge.
March 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens Institute of Technology)	Generative AI in Creative Work	Many workers in the creative professions, including game designers, graphic designers, writers, illustrators, photographers, and filmmakers have begun using Generative AI such as GPT-3, Bard, Dali, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion to create concept art for games, find angles for stories, and generate short videos. This talk considers how interaction with these types of AI might be improved, especially by augmenting language models with other technologies. One aspect of this talk focuses on the way these tools can be used in journalism, based on the development and testing of a tool that generates story angles. Another aspect of the talk is more general, and considers how data functions as a kind of material in design.
April 6, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Shi Ying LIM	When Too Much Plasticity Exists: The Perils of Digital Templating in a Nascent Digital Venture	Nascent digital ventures have to allocate scarce resources to the creation of digital products. Past research espouses the change and stability benefits of digital templates as a base design for nascent digital ventures. We present a longitudinal case study of a nascent digital health venture and reveal that a focus on the reuse of templates led to continuous cognitive and material stretching of digital templates to create derivative digital products efficiently, which enabled stability amidst change. However, these practices also created inefficiency associated with too much change and too little stability, as the plasticity of digital templates was amplified through cognitive and material stretching.
May 4, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Abayomi Baiyere and Kathryn Brohman (Queen's University)	How is Digital [X] Transforming Research and Management School Education?	Meet the incoming SIG DITE President and learn about a new study that explores the Digital X phenomenon in the context of transforming research and management education.
June 1st, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Llewellyn Thomas (IESE)	Vertical and horizontal complementarities in platform ecosystems	We develop a framework of vertical and horizontal complementarities in platform ecosystems. We distinguish between “vertical complementarity” which signifies how complements (e.g., apps) increase the value of a platform (e.g., Android) and “horizontal complementarity” which relates to the complementarities between complements on a platform (e.g., payment app and a gaming app). This distinction helps to clarify the notion of complementarities in platform ecosystems.
July 6, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Erwin Fielt (Queensland University of Technology)	Digital business model innovation	With the growing attention to digital innovation and transformation, business models have become a strategic imperative for organizations and a prominent research topic in the management and Information Systems (IS) disciples. While digital business models are often discussed in management and IS literature, they mostly lack explicit conceptualization and theorization. Moreover, the literature on digital technologies discusses specific varieties (AI- enabled business models, blockchain-enabled business models, IIoT- enabled business models, etc.) without addressing the bigger, ‘digital’ picture. In this presentation, we will first discuss different perspectives on digital business model innovation. Next, we will propose a theoretical perspective based on the notion of external enablers. Finally, we will address how digital business models and traditional business models can come together in organizations by understanding business model portfolios.
Sep. 7, 2023, 3:00-4:30pm	Joey van Angeren (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)	The Dual Face of Platform Interfaces	To enable third-party developers to produce apps on top of digital platforms, those platforms provide well-documented and standardized interfaces that grant developers access to specific platform components. Developers choose whether to leverage such platform interfaces, and we investigate the implications of this choice for their ability to produce follow-on app innovations using a monthly panel dataset of around a thousand Firefox extensions.
Oct. 5, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Hannes Rothe (ICN Business School), Abayomi Baiyere (Queen's University), Daniel Fürstenau, Matthias Schulte-Althoff, Kai Schewina (all FU Berlin)	An Extended Theory of Generativity on Digital Platforms	The assumption that generativity engenders unbounded growth has acquired an almost taken-for-granted position in information systems and management literature. We examine the relationship between generativity and user base growth in the context of a digital platform and propose an Extended Generativity Theory that presents generativity and growth in an integrative view and raises awareness about the limitations of the “unbounded growth” claim.
Nov. 2, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Hakan Özalp (University of Amsterdam)	Standardized Technologies, Human Capital and Employee Mobility	We study the de-facto standardization of middleware tools within the video game industry, and explore how it made human capital more general and industry specific (rather than firm-specific), which in turn increased the ability of individuals to move between companies. We contrast the impact on individuals with skills that are complementary to these technologies in comparison to those being substituted by these technologies. We find that the diffusion of middleware tools led to an increase in labor mobility on average but was associated with higher mobility for individuals with skills that complemented those tools, in comparison to those that were partly substituted by these tools.
Dec. 7, 2023 3:00-4:30pm	Sabine Brunswicker (Purdue University)	The Impact of Empathy in Conversational AI: A Controlled Experiment with a Legal Chatbot	The rise of ChatGPT has revealed the potential of chatbots and other conversational AI tools to assist humans in fields such as law and healthcare, where the best human experts can engage in empathetic conversations. Our research aims to develop and empirically test a theory of empathy in the language displayed by conversational AI, explaining the relational outcomes of human-AI conversations in terms of cognitive effort, helpfulness, and trustworthiness. Using this theory, a chatbot is designed using syntactic and rhetorical linguistic elements that evoke empathy when providing legal services to tenants renting property. Through a randomized controlled experiment with a 2 by 3 factorial design, the effects of this empathetic chatbot on three relational outcomes in human-AI conversations are examined and compared to a non-empathetic chatbot that maintains the same logic. A baseline model utilizing non-conversational access to legal services via frequently asked questions ("FAQs") is also implemented, and the subjects' emotional state (anger) is manipulated as a moderating factor. The study involves 277 participants randomly assigned to one of six groups. The findings demonstrate the significance of both main and interaction effects on trustworthiness, usefulness, and cognitive effort. The results indicate that subtle changes in language syntax and style can have substantial implications for the outcomes of human-AI conversations. These findings contribute to the growing literature on conversational AI and have practical implications for the design of conversational and generative AI.