ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF IT-RELATED RESOURCES IN FIRM INNOVATION

Abstract

This thesis comprises of two studies that attempt to address three gaps in the prior literature on how IT resources support firm innovation: 1) how IT professionals constitute firms’ innovation capability, as well as how firms manage their recruitment for innovation; 2) how organizational capabilities provided by/developed from enterprise IT systems can assist firms in creating new businesses; and 3) how to organize enterprise IT systems to support the innovation of firms. The first study of this thesis attempts to address the first gap by theorizing how firms can manage their capability for creating innovation via the hiring of foreign IT professionals and testing two hypotheses based on this theory. The second study of this thesis attempts to address the second and third gaps by investigating the impact of firms’ deployment of enterprise IT systems on the entrepreneurial action of creating a new business.