BTECH research seminar

Click here to participate in the seminar

Name: Lukas Falcke

Position: Doctoral Student

University: University of St. Gallen

Email: lukas.falcke@unisg.ch

Lukas Falcke is a doctoral student at the Institute of Management and Strategy, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. In his PhD, supervised by Prof. Zobel and funded by a swiss national science foundation’s grant on digital transformation, he is working on digital and open innovation in the context of achieving net zero emissions. He presented his research on boundary spanners at the WOIC 2019 and the AOM Annual Meeting 2020, where a 6-page version of this work was published in the AOM Annual Meetings’ Best Paper Proceedings. In other ongoing projects he is working on the external sourcing of digital technologies (working paper), social comparison and identification (data analysis), identification trajectories (data analysis) and IT-enabled capabilities (data analysis). Currently, he is also interested in how digital platforms & platform ecosystems are transforming infrastructure-intensive industries (e.g. energy industry, cities etc.). Before joining the University of St. Gallen, he studied electrical and computer engineering at RWTH Aachen, was a fellow in management, technology and economics at ETH Zürich and a visiting researcher at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He gained some first insights into industry during internships as a digital strategy consultant at McKinsey and as a data scientist at UBS.

Presentation:

Sourcing external digital solutions: The architecture of digital technologies and knowledge exchange across firm boundaries

Sourcing of external digital solution has become an important strategy incumbent firms are using to accelerate their digital transformation. However, external knowledge and technology sourcing is a complex, multi-phase process that requires exchanging various kinds of knowledge across cognitive, technological and organizational boundaries. Using a longitudinal in-depth qualitative analysis of 15 early-stage pilot projects between startups offering digital solutions and electric utilities seeking to adopt them as empirical setting, we develop a framework of external digital technology sourcing. This framework explicates how and why knowledge exchange patterns differ given a derived set of digital technology integration processes - positioned along the digital technology stack. We show that service enablement at the data-application interface triggers a parallel knowledge iteration pattern, system harmonization at the data-network interface triggers a concurrent knowledge co-creation pattern and assuring hardware efficacy at the network-device interface triggers a sequential knowledge validation pattern. We discuss contributions to the literature on digital innovation and external knowledge sourcing.