Digital Solutions to Societal Problems: Studies on Organizing Collaboration for Digital Health

Today’s societal problems are numerous and urgent and vary from issues in healthcare to climate change. The potential for solutions unleashed by digital technology can help to address these problems. For example, digital applications can help to manage diseases such as obesity and diabetes by educating and stimulating patients to mindfully engage with their own health. Despite their value potential, the widespread adoption of digital in those sectors from which society could potentially benefit most seems to still be lagging behind. Why is that? In this dissertation, I increase insight into the collaborations that are required for digital innovation to address societal problems, specifically those in healthcare, by answering the research question: how do firms collaborate with actors to realize value from digital innovation? To answer this question. I carried out three in-depth studies on firms who developed digital health innovations but depended on the support of multiple, yet diverse, actors to realize value from it. In Chapter 2, I focus on how firms manage the interdependencies between actors on which they depend for creating and realizing value from a digital solution. To offer a compelling value proposition (the promised benefits of a (set of) products) to customers, firms often depend on firms such as suppliers of product components or firms offering complementary products or services, which they have to persuade to collaborate. In contrast to previous studies, I find that realizing value was constrained despite the fact that the focal firm succeeded in getting support from suppliers and complementors. I show that further downstream, customers themselves have interdependencies that need to be reconfigured before value can be derived from adopting firms’ offerings. In Chapter 3, I focus on how firms deal with the pluralistic demands of multiple actors on which they depend for support and resources. Realizing value from a new digital solution is challenging because actors are often not immediately persuaded by its value. Firms can use symbolic strategies like framing in an attempt to get their support. Yet, because of actors’ pluralistic demands, a specific frame can enable a firm to acquire the support from one actor, but simultaneously hamper enrolling another. In the study, I identify two framing strategies and illustrate how acquiring and maintaining support from multiple actors simultaneously depends on initial and the sequence of frames used over time. In Chapter 4, I provide insight into how firms can use framing to compete for actor support. While acquiring support from the actors on which a firm depends is essential (as I show in Chapters 2 and 3), firms also have to make sure that it is their solutions that receives support and not their competitors’. I show that the optimal configuration of frames to get support from actors and diversify from their competitors is dependent on the type of framer, in addition to the framing strategies and the audiences that are being addressed. Overall, the findings of this dissertation indicate that realizing value from digital solutions to address societal problems is a highly distributed, interdependent and consequential process. To overcome these barriers, it requires deep involvement, understanding, adaptation and learning from a wide range of actors what the digital solution offers to them but also how it affects them, while keeping track of unintended consequences. Based on these findings, I offer two overall theoretical implications: I highlight how an ecosystem lens can benefit scholars beyond ecosystem research, and I show how strategy in interdependent settings needs to be adaptive and integrative. This dissertation also offers practical implications for business and policymakers and some methodological reflections on process research and conducting field studies.