Effective ICT use for Digital Innovation: An Actualized Affordance Perspective through ICT enabled Design Thinking

Available technologies in organizations can be exploited for creating useful innovative solutions in a rather quick, efficient and economical way. Despite the huge benefits that can be derived by proactively exploiting available technologies and systems for innovation, there is relatively less academic research devoted to the subject. Motivated by this perceptible gap in the digital innovation literature, we theorize and examine the role of one possible structured creative mechanism (design thinking approach) for exploiting existing digital technologies to facilitate innovation. Grounding our arguments in the ‘effective use of IS’ and ‘technology affordance’ literature, we conceptualize innovation agent attributes and actualized innovation affordance achieved through the use of ICT, as the two salient facilitators for digital innovation. Innovation agent attributes are operationalized via domain generic and domain specific attributes of ‘creative self-efficacy’ and ‘affect towards ICT use’ and actualized innovation affordance is operationalized as the effective use of available technologies through an ‘ICT enabled design-thinking approach’. The hypothesized model is empirically tested via a quasi-experimental method comprising data from a two-wave temporally separated survey. Results establish the significant influence of both — innovation agent attributes and actualized innovation affordance for facilitating digital innovation. Moreover, actualized innovation affordance, operationalized through ICT-DT, has a stronger association with digital innovation compared to the innovation agent attributes. This result underlines the need for organizations to proactively focus on using ICT effectively through structured creativity approaches (such as DT) for facilitating innovative outcomes. The study also offers several implications for research and practice.