The Intangible Key for Digitalization: Conceptualizing and Measuring the “Digital Mindset”

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The Intangible Key for Digitalization:

Conceptualizing and Measuring the “Digital Mindset”

Yannick Hildebrandt

Information Systems Management University of Bamberg Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany

yannick.hildebrandt@uni- bamberg.de

Daniel Beimborn

Information Systems Management University of Bamberg Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany [email protected]

CCS CONCEPTS

•Social and professional topics •Professional topics •Management of computing and information systems •Project and people management

KEYWORDS

Digital mindset; digitalization; operationalization;

conceptualization; digital thinking;

ACM Reference format:

Yannick Hildebrandt, Daniel Beimborn. 2021. The Intangible Key for Digitalization: Conceptualizing and Measuring the “Digital Mindset”. In Proceedings of the 2021 Computers and People Research Conference 2021 (CPR’21). June 30, 2021. Virtual Event, Germany https://doi.org/10.1145/3458026.3462152

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Digital transformation causes huge changes in personal, societal, and organizational environments. Individuals, their behavior and thinking, are named as essential drivers to successfully realize digital innovation and to implement digital transformation [8]. In this context the “digital mindset” of employees is frequently issued as a critical component [6], we value the digital mindset as an important factor of the human side of digitalization in IS research to enable supportive ways of thinking in a digital transforming environment (digital mindset) next to the ability of supportive acting (digital skills and competencies). For instance, there are employees who recognize evolving digital technologies like cloud computing, blockchain, or artificial intelligence not only as passively existing, but are also able to filter their combinatorial potentials to disrupt or permeate into other industries for strengthened competitiveness. These employees quickly detect potentials of evolving technologies through an open and experimental adoption and through considering opportunities beyond their own functional silos. They do not plan projects and tasks in a traditional high-fidelity way, but are convenient with uncertainty and achieving success by exhausting trial-and-error approaches. The phenomenon that lays behind these ways of thinking, that is distinguishing digitally experienced people, is what we call the digital mindset. These

patterns of thinking, related to the characteristics of evolved digital technologies and related phenomena of digitalization, enable people to make the right decisions and have the right ideas for the digitalization of their company or society. So far, the

‘digital mindset’ term has been used in ambivalent ways in IS literature, stemming from different perspectives or is seen as a part of digital competencies and is suffering from an overall unclear interpretation. On one hand, it is used synonymously to digital thinking [5], agile mindset [11], or digital leadership [3].

On the other hand, there is a lack of clear definitions [1] or it is used quite superficially for describing usage and interaction with digital technologies. Lastly, in IS research different “digital mindset”

definitions are used [1, 3, 5, 9, 11].

Research on mindset, in general, is not new. The literature holds work in developing conceptualizations of mindsets, exhibiting different perspectives on this concept, and also provides related conceptualizations such as the “agile mindset” [4, 11]. However, despite the existence of substantial research on the mindset, in general, and different ‘specializations’ of the mindset concept, the literature is lacking an unambiguous, theoretical conceptualization of “digital mindset” which takes the different psychological perspectives into account. Further, due to the novel reveals and notions of the digital mindset as a human factor for digitalization in contemporary IS research [6, 13], the phenomenon lacks empirical research. That is, there are indicators that the digital mindset is an essential factor of the human side of digitalization, but there is no sufficient conceptualization and measurement model that enables the further development of IS theory investigating to what extend the digital mindset impacts or hampers success of people or organizations at transforming digitally. Therefore, in this paper we address the following research question: How can the digital mindset be conceptualized and operationalized?

To answer this question, we draw on the mindset literature from psychology and on the research stream of digital innovation (DI) and transformation (DT) within the IS literature. For conceptualizing the construct, we conducted a literature review according to Webster and Watson [14], analyzing 29 integrative literature reviews about concepts of digital innovation and transformation. These literature reviews were analyzed regarding characteristics, concepts, traits, phenomena, or components of DT or DI that were coded during the analysis, leading to a list of 471 concepts. We filtered for duplicates and excluded items only

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SIGMIS-CPR '21, June 30, 2021, Virtual Event, Germany

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8406-3/21/06.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3458026.3462152

Session 4 - Digital Innovation, Mindsets and Adaptation SIGMIS-CPR ’21, June 30, 2021, Virtual Event, Germany

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mentioned in one review, resulting in reduced lists of 297 concepts. Filtering related and overlapping concepts (e.g. internal collaboration and external collaboration) and formulating overarching generic terms (e.g. ‘collaboration’), we could reduce the list to 134 concepts. This list was analyzed on synonyms (e.g.

‘collaboration’ and ‘working together’). Finally, we developed a concept matrix according to Webster and Watson [14] and ended up with a list of 31 concepts for DT and DI. These concepts were then used to derive concept-centered thinking patterns, constituting a digital mindset. Following the conceptualization, we used common guidelines as documented by DeVellis [2] to develop and validate a measurement instrument for the developed thinking patterns and the digital mindset. Therefore, we first aimed for construct clarity by defining the dimensions of the digital mindset (i.e., the thinking patterns), using the findings of the literature review. Subsequently, an initial item pool was generated, reflecting all identified thinking patterns. An expert panel consisting of 6 researchers and 5 practitioners with

experience in the field of digital innovation or transformation were asked to evaluate the initial set of items with a formal rating procedure adapted from Verhagen et al. [12]. Finally, an empirical scale evaluation and optimization was conducted as the last step of the scale development for a first validation [2]. 39 Individuals (ranging from graduate students with work experience in digital projects and startup ventures to fulltime practitioners) conducted an online survey with the randomized and revised items.

Summarizing the findings of our work leads to the following contributions: Firstly, we conceptualized the digital mindset as consisting of 15 thinking patterns that support the task of digitalization (Figure 1). The analyses showed concepts like collaborative thinking or risk-affine thinking, which are already known and that are named in a digital context, and thinking patterns like technological recombinatorial thinking in terms of modularity, product-agnostic, disruptive and convergent thinking that seem to evolved recently through the characteristics of digital technologies.

Figure 1: Thinking patterns of the digital mindset

Our detailed conceptualization contributes to a further understanding of the human side of digitalization in IS research and fills the gap of an adequate definition of a digital mindset. It reveals, that despite scholars use different concepts like agile mindset or platform mindset synonymously, this is not de facto wrong, but reflects only a small part of the entire digital mindset concept. This further explains the interchangeable use as these definitions try to explain the thinking patterns only from a narrow perspective which place known ways of thinking in the digital context. We conclude that especially the newly evolved thinking patterns identified in our work and stemming from the characteristics of digital technologies are essential for a holistic conceptualization and propose a categorization and further research on these components and their causal relationship to the

overarching concept. Secondly, we developed a measurement tool based on these thinking patterns, consisting of 49 items. Through the inclusion, results, and revision with the help of an expert panel we could support content validity of our items, followed by a first pilot test which showed, for most dimensions, a quite stable measurement instrument.

The developed thinking patterns can serve as an orientation for firms aiming at renovating their company culture. As digital mindsets can be viewed as the premise for a successful digitalization, firms should consider these ways of thinking as highly relevant for the future. For academic research, the developed definition of a digital mindset provides the first unified conceptualization and thus resolves blurry articulations, ambiguities, and misinterpretations of the concepts.

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