Veröffentlichungen von Ferdinand Mittermeier

Konferenz-Artikel (Peer Reviewed)

Mittermeier, F., Hund, A., Beimborn, D., Frey, J., and Hildebrandt, Y. (2024)
Externalizing Digital Options Thinking: How Corporate Venture Builders Generate Opportunities to Invest in Digital Innovation
Proceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Paphos, Cyprus

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To avoid conflicts with the core business and the existing organizational identity, incumbents increasingly externalize their digital innovation activities by handing them over to separate innovation units. While IS research provides knowledge on how internally driven innovations are initiated and developed in such units, we do not yet understand how they capitalize on internal resources, combine them with external ones, and pursue competitive actions with digital technologies. To address this issue, we apply a digital options thinking lens to investigate how corporate venture builders (CVBs) generate digital options for incumbent firms, ie, opportunities to invest in digital innovations. Based on a case study with six CVBs, we find that such units bundle incumbents’ resources and digital innovation trends (novel technologies and digital business models) into digital options through four roles. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of adding a detailed preparation process to the digital options framework.

Mittermeier, F. (2024)
Upgrading Digital Units: Why Incumbent Firms Engage in Digital Venture Building
Proceedings of the 30th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Salt Lake City, US

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To drive digital innovation and navigate the challenges of digital transformation, incumbent firms have increasingly launched digital units (DUs). While research in the field of IS has primarily focused on internally oriented DUs (i.e., innovation labs), there are first signs of a shift towards more externally oriented variants (i.e., digital venture builders) in theory and practice. Based on an interview study with 13 experts from different industries, we highlight four intentions (i.e., new growth potential, extension of the knowledge base, opportunity to renew employees’ perception, and hybrid ambidexterity) why established companies transform their internally oriented DUs into digital venture builders. We make this transition more comprehensible by linking the intentions to the main reasons for the failure of internally orientated DUs. By doing so, we contribute to the existing IS literature on DUs, especially the recent development regarding the phenomenon’s evolution.

Frey, J., Mittermeier, F., and Beimborn, D. (2023)
Digital Transformation: How Scaling Agility Affects Value Creation Paths
Proceedings of the 2023 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Panama City, Panama

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Structural changes are a key element of digital transformation and affect value creation paths such as digital agility. Scaling agility constitutes such a structural change. Research has highlighted the need to increase our understanding of the underlying changes to understand the microfoundations that undergird digital transformation. Thus, we look at how scaling agility affects value creation paths by answering the question, “How does the structural change of scaling agility affect changes in value creation paths in digital transformation?” We conduct a multiple case study with four organizations. The study surfaces three observations of this structural change that enable digital agility: Cross-functionality to allow for the emergence of creative ideas, fostering self-organizing to seize digital opportunities, and higher value chain interconnectedness for improved delivery. Furthermore, we identify two barriers as inhibitors of such transformations: complexity trap and resource foundation. We contribute to understanding digital transformation and provide valuable insights for practitioners.

Mittermeier, F., Pöppinghaus, C.Fa, and Beimborn, D. (2023)
Digital Start-up Success: How Formal Education and Academic Diversity Impact New Digital Ventures’ Performance
Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Maui, Hawaii, US

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Factors affecting the creation, growth, and survival of new businesses are of great interest to entrepreneurs, policymakers, and academics and have been studied for a long time. While the importance of work experience is constantly emphasized, the benefits of formal education are often questioned in practice. This study discusses the impact of founders' academic background and diversity on the success of digital startups. By analyzing 519 digital start-ups and 1,038 founders, we show that the ranking of the universities the founders graduated from and the quantitativeness of the founders’ majors both contribute to the funding success of digital start-ups. In contrast to previous literature, we were not able to confirm that diversity, measured in the distance between the rankings of two majors, has a significant impact on the success of digital start-ups. The findings enhance our understanding regarding the importance of general human capital in the digital age.

Mittermeier, F. (2022)
Digital Options Generators – The Case of Corporate Venture Builders
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Copenhagen, Denmark (TREO Talk)

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To avoid conflicts with the core business and the existing organizational identity, incumbents increasingly externalize their digital innovation activities by handing them over to separate innovation units. While IS research provides knowledge on how internally driven innovations are initiated and developed in such units, we do not yet understand how they capitalize on internal resources, combine them with external ones, and pursue competitive actions with digital technologies. To address this issue, we apply a digital options thinking lens to investigate how corporate venture builders (CVBs) generate digital options for incumbent firms, i.e., opportunities to invest in digital innovations. Based on a case study with six CVBs, we find that such units bundle incumbents’ resources and digital innovation trends (novel technologies and digital business models) into digital options through four roles. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of adding a detailed preparation process to the digital options framework.

Mittermeier, F., Hund, A., and Beimborn, D. (2022)
Entrepreneurial Support Systems in the Digital Era: A Taxonomy of Digital Company Builders
Proceedings of the 28th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Minneapolis, US
Kauffman Best Paper Award

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New venture creation is at the core of entrepreneurship and regarded as the source of innovations and new employment. However, despite the potential, that digitization bears for innovation and entrepreneurship, the failure rate of start-ups is still very high. In this context, digital company builders (DCBs) are becoming increasingly important as a new form of entrepreneurial support. Based on a multiple case study with ten DCBs we iteratively developed a taxonomy consisting of 13 dimensions, which describe how such organizations provide what kind of support to whom. Based on this taxonomy, we further grouped the cases into four main types of digital company building. These results may provide researchers a tool to systematically compare different entrepreneurial support systems, help both entrepreneurs and incumbents decide which support system is best suited to their individual needs, and furthermore be useful to the owners of DCBs themselves in their strategic positioning.

Mittermeier, F., Hund, A., and Beimborn, D. (2022)
Digital Innovation Entrepreneurship: A Review and Research Agenda
Proceedings of the 82nd Academy of Management Conference, Seattle, US

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Digital innovation and digital entrepreneurship are two research streams that focus on the intersection of digital technologies with traditional entrepreneurship or innovation processes, respectively. In this sense, both streams can cross-fertilize each other when it comes to theorizing about digital technologies and their distinct characteristics in the context of entrepreneurship. However, recent studies show that there seems to be a large gap between these two fields of research. By analyzing 86 articles from four different disciplines, this review synthesizes the current knowledge on the intersection of digital entrepreneurship and digital innovation through a digital technology-perspective. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: (1) Providing an overview of current knowledge about the relationship between digital entrepreneurship, digital innovation and digital technology, (2) Building a framework of digital innovation entrepreneurship, which describes how digital entrepreneurs engage in continuous digital innovation through the use of digital technology, and (3) identifying avenues that guide future research.

Mittermeier, F., Hund, A., Beimborn, D., and Wagner, H. (2021)
Towards a Conceptual Model of Digital Innovation Success
Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research, Virtual Event, Germany

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Although digital innovation (‘DI’) is a popular research field in these days, when it comes to innovation success, it has not yet been properly grounded in theory. Accordingly, there are problems in identifying both generic and context-specific critical success factors (CSF) within the innovation process. Existing literature has focused mainly on the development of dynamic capabilities. We argue that to build digital innovation capabilities, an organization must first understand and support the actions of those who are actively developing DI. To uncover specific actions that constitute CSFs within every dimension of the digital innovation process, we follow a multiple case study design with seven companies from different industries. Here, we build upon the ‘digital innovation framework’ which defines the process of creating DI across four dimensions (initiate, develop, implement, exploit). Based on these case studies, we build a conceptual model consisting of digital innovation actions, critical success factors and contingency factors. The proposed model serves as a starting point for future research, which should focus on a detailed quantitative investigation of the cause-effect relationships and the contingency factors to validate our propositions.

Mittermeier, F., Hund, A., and Beimborn, D. (2020)
Digital Company Builders - Exploring a new Phenomenon of Start-up Incubation
Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Digital Innovation, Transformation and Entrepreneurship (DITE), Cologne, Germany
(Research in Progress)