The Extension of Digital Ventures
by
Ola Henfridsson
Professor of Business Technology
Miami Herbert Business School
University of Miami
Thursday, Oct 22
9:00 – 10:00 am | Zoom
Abstact:
Digital ventures typically face significant growth expectations. A common response is to extend the current operations into new areas through core entrepreneurship processes for business extension: productive opportunity creation and opportunity actualization. We surmise that the versatility of the digital venture’s digital core (e.g., new search engine, data mining technique, platform, or voice interface) facilitates these processes by reducing cost and increasing speed. To this end, we use Penrose’s work for analyzing a two-year in-depth case study of a Chinese digital venture’s extension of their initial operations based on its credit rating technology. We trace four key processes contributing to productive opportunity creation and opportunity actualization through our grounded analysis: problematizing and concepting (creation of productive opportunity) and templating and reusing (opportunity actualization). We observe how these processes are enabled by the versatility of the case organization’s digital core. Synthesizing our findings, we contribute to the emerging digital innovation and entrepreneurship literature related to business growth by developing a process model of digital venture extension.