Community Ecology for Innovation Concept: The Case of Cloud Computing

摘要

Why do some concepts come to be highly popular, significantly reshaping the IT landscape, while others do not? We address this question by exploring the communities of organizations that underlie IT innovation concepts. In an illustrative investigation of the community for cloud computing, we integrate theories of organizational ecology and scale-free network and their associated methods. Substantial support of the theories and the effectiveness of the methods have led us to embark on a promising research program focused on IT innovation concepts and communities. This program affords several opportunities to break new grounds in IS research: (1) adding an ecological explanation to theories of IT innovations; (2) fertilizing new ground for IT innovation research; (3) stimulating research on scale-free networks associated with IT innovations; and (4) demonstrating the utility of computational discourse analysis.