Management Science and Engineering Department's Lecture

Theme：Technology-Human Interactions for Innovation Production in the Digital Age

Speaker：John Qi Dong (Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen)

Time：2019-08-15 10:00

Address：Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

Abstract： 
In recent years, firms have ever increasingly used new digital technologies (e.g., cloud computing, social media, and big data analytics), which massively interact with humans within organizations. How the usage of new digital technologies has changed the role of R&D labor in firms' innovation production is far from clear. In this work, we investigate how firms use different types of digital technologies in their production for innovation, and how these digital technologies interact with innovation inputs (i.e., R&D capital and labor). By using recent micro data from 2609 German firms, we show that firms’ level of digital technology use does not have direct effects on a firm’s gross innovation output. Instead, the usage of digital technologies — specifically, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), cloud computing, social media, and big data analytics — are either complementary or substitutable to R&D inputs by augmenting or reducing their elasticity. Our results are robust after controlling for complementarity/substitutability between the R&D inputs, endogeneity in digital technology use, selection bias in innovation production, constant returns to scale, potential multicollinearity between R&D inputs, and different measures of digital technologies.

Short biography：
John Qi Dong is an associate professor with tenure at Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD degree in information systems from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He also received a master degree and a bachelor degree, both in management, from Renmin University of China. His research interests include digital innovation, digital transformation, collaborative innovation, and organizational learning. His work has been published or forthcoming in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Information and Management, Long Range Planning, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Business Research, and Drug Discovery Today, among others. He currently serves as a senior editor for Information Technology and People, an associate editor for Information and Management, and an editorial board member for Journal of Strategic Information Systems. He was the associate editor for Decision Support Systems special issue on omnichannel business.