BUILDING DIGITAL CAPABILITIES FOR TRIAL-BASED PROBLEM SOLVING: A DESIGN THEORY

摘要

Businesses in the networked digital industries face increasingly turbulent environments,characterized not only by rapid evolution but by unpredictable and disruptive changethat devalues the knowledge built up through experience. In response, a number ofprominent companies are beginning to employ a strategy of widespread and continuousexperimentation, supported by new business intelligence technologies, as a better wayto keep up with the changes in their markets. Despite a great deal of hype, however,there has been too little theoretical guidance about how to implement this kind ofstrategy or in what situations it might be appropriate. This paper draws on a recentlydevelopedtheory of trial-based problem solving (TBPS) to articulate a new designtheory that may fill this gap. Using an information systems design theory (ISDT)framework, this work translates the new theory into a set of practical principles that canbe applied across a number of problem domains.