Editorial Section "Digital Disruption"

THE DIGITAL DISRUPTION SPECIAL SECTION
Two articles in this special section of CIM have been selected among 40 submissions to three International ISPIM conferences and summits in Melbourne, Stockholm and Fukuoka. The submissions are related to the ISPIM Special Interest Group on Digital Disruption that launched a call for conceptual and empirical studies tackling the challenges and opportunities presented by digital disruption and transformation. Next activities are planned at the forthcoming conferences in Berlin 2021 and Copenhagen 2022.

The special section editors, Frank Gertsen, Claus Rosenstand, Katharina Hölzle and K.R.E. (Eelko) Huizingh, understand digital disruption as disruption enabled by digital technologies with exponential price-performance development, for example, IoT, AI and Big Data. Disruption is broadly understood as ‘… a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent business’ (Christensen et al., 2015, p. 46).

While there is no doubt that digital disruption and transformation have enormous impact in various domains of our society and to our everyday life, the two articles concern the impact of digital disruption and transformation on the business domain. To this end, many articles in academic and more popular outlets discuss disruption at a general level, typically of firms being disrupted and likewise general optimistic technology prescriptions of future prospects. We see that the conceptual confusion calls for more detailed discussions of differentiated solutions and the digital technology solutions need to become more operational, which the articles in this special section contribute to.

The article ‘Digital Transformation: What We Have Learned (Thus Far) and What Is Next’ by Sabrina Schneider and Olga Kokshagina investigates academic and practitioner views on digital transformation through a substantial literature review and combines the findings in order to bring the research and practical views on the digital transformation together and generate a future research agenda. Both in the exponentially growing academic publications related to digital technology and in corporate practice, there is a good deal of confusion regarding key terms and definitions as well as uncertainty about how to best approach the digital journey. The article provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on digitalization in the business, management and related literatures. The insight is combined with interviews with designated senior leaders assigned to drive digital transformation and disruption in companies across Europe. The findings from the academic and the practitioner perspectives suggest a future research agenda for digital transformation and disruption.

The second article focuses on platforms. No doubt many of the most exposed disruptions are based on digital platforms of the type B2C and/or C2C. In many cases, such platforms have been extremely successful. This development has begun to diffuse into the B2B area, and as more and more businesses aspire to build such platforms, the need for systematic and easy ways to do this increases. This is the claim and outset for the article ‘Pattern Based Development of Digital Platforms’ by Marvin Drewel, Jürgen Gausemeier, Christian Koldewey and Leon Özcan. The authors systematically decompose the platform concept and introduce a generic methodology for the pattern-based development of digital platforms relying on proven principals to reduce the risks of platform development. They identify 37 patterns and provide a process model containing guiding questions that need to be answered to establish a digital platform. As an example, a case from the machine industry is provided. Theoretically, the article contributes to a more differentiated understanding of platforms as well as to fill technical knowledge gaps.