Daniel Nylén

Oscillating Between Four Orders of Design: The Case of Digital Magazines

The emergence of digital technology represents a paradigmatic historical shift. As a process transforming sociotechnical structures, digitalization has had pervasive effects on organizing structures and business logics, as well as contemporary society as a whole. In recent years, these effects have been particularly salient in the content-based (e.g. music and imaging), and most recently the print-media (e.g. newspapers and magazines) industries. Facing dramatically declining sales of print media products, publishers have sought to leverage digital technology for innovation. However, the digital revenues still do not yet typically compensate for the decline in print media sales. This thesis explores the organizational implications of digitalization in the media domain. Scholars have increasingly stressed that digital technology has some distinct characteristics that have fundamental implications for innovation. This thesis examines aspects of these implications that have been far from fully explored, including the roles of digital technologies as enablers of process innovation (new methods, procedures or responsibilities), product innovation outcomes (which shift or expand an organizations domain) and associated changes in organizational cognition and identity. The thesis is based on four empirical investigations, reported in appended papers, of the evolution of digital platforms, the new content creation practices they enable, and how traditional print media firms have sought to innovate and reorient themselves in relation to these novel phenomena. The composite analysis illustrates how the distinct characteristics of digital technologies are complicit in transitions from stable to fragile product categories, highlights the need for a dynamic approach to identity orientation, and discusses and proposes key concerns in scholarly studies of digital innovation in organizations based on insights generated by the underlying studies.

From Forestry Machines to Sociotechnical Hybrids: Investigating the Use of Digitally Enabled Forestry Machines

Most forestry machines being produced today include a personal com puter that monitors and controls the harvester head, and an information system that stores data on every action the driver or the machine performs. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) thus provide an opportunity to improve effi ciency and competitiveness and possibly also opens up new ways of working for actors in the forestry industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate how ICT can enable the transformation from selling products to selling services in the forestry industry. We investigate such transformation through conducting a case study including a number of actors from the forestry industry in northern Sweden. First, we investigate the barriers for establishing an open innovation system in forestry. Then we describe how the use of ICTs can enable the establishment of such a system. The case study shows that the forestry industry as a whole is dominated by the salient traditional value chain where the raw materials are refined to paper products and that many of the actors are committed to a closed innovation paradigm. We argue that the ICT component in forestry machines constitutes a latent potential that can be fully captured in the context of an open innovation system.

The Role of YouTube in the Digitalization of TV: A Case Study of Novel Value Co-creation Practices at United Screens

Research has shown how incumbent firms in content- based industries (e.g. music, news and photography) were radically affected by digitalization as powerful digital platforms emerged as new loci of ...

Tracing Emergent Structure in Self-Organized Citizen Journalism

In citizen journalism, the citizens that used to form the mass audience utilize IT artifacts such as smart phones and social media to inform each other and the broader public. Previous research has highlighted how citizen journalism published on independent web-based platforms can substitute (or complement) traditional news publishing, and illuminated the challenges of integrating elements of citizen journalism into mainstream news organizations. Still, less is known about how self-organized citizen journalism processes emerge and evolve. The paper draws on complexity theory in a detailed analysis of an online forum thread in which users collaboratively investigated and published detailed information about a local murder case. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature on citizen journalism. Firstly, it demonstrates the efficacy of using a complexity perspective. Secondly, it illustrates and theorizes the ways in which IT-based citizen journalism was self-organized via a specific online forum through sequenced interaction themes.