Publications
A small body of work. The dissertation sets the argument; the published papers extend and complicate it; the current work asks what is changing now. Open a row to read what the paper found and how it came about.
Google Scholar · ORCID · ResearchGate
On the record
Dissertation
2022Organisational Dynamics of Digital Innovation
Digital innovation is shaped, sometimes undermined, by the materiality of digital artifacts.
The papers that follow grow out of, alongside, and away from this central claim. Each of them is also a chapter, or the seed of a chapter, of the work.
Hron, M. (2022). Organisational Dynamics of Digital Innovation. PhD dissertation, Aarhus University, Aarhus BSS, Department of Management. Assessment committee: Andrea Carugati (Aarhus BSS), Xiao Xiao (Copenhagen Business School), Nicholas Berente (Notre Dame).
Journal articles
2021Innovation Drift
Digital resources leak across organizational boundaries and erode the very separation meant to incubate the new.
The paper that taught me what doing research really means. It blazes the central argument of the dissertation: digital artifacts can be the source of both radical possibility and its undoing in the same case. The peer review was painful. The editor was generous in a way I still think about. Not the most cited paper. The one I am most proud of.
Hron, M., Obwegeser, N., & Müller, S. D. (2021). Innovation drift: the influence of digital artefacts on organising for innovation. Innovation: Organization & Management, 1–33.
2022Why and how is Scrum being adapted in practice
A systematic review of 963 papers on how and why Scrum gets modified in actual organizations.
Where I discovered I have an eye for synthesis. The work started in a master thesis project. I kept pushing on the analysis and the writing for years. This is the paper I love for the craft.
Hron, M., & Obwegeser, N. (2022). Why and how is Scrum being adapted in practice: A systematic review. Journal of Systems and Software, 183, 111110.
Conference papers
2021The Quest for New Theoretical Logics of Digital Innovation
Links properties of digital artifacts to the frames that put them to use as options, resources, or experiences.
The conceptual precursor to the dissertation, written in part out of frustration. The information systems literature on digital innovation kept invoking the same properties of digital artifacts: editability, openness, interactivity, reprogrammability. It did not work out how those properties travelled into the organizational frames built on top of them.
Hron, M. (2021). The Quest for New Theoretical Logics of Digital Innovation: Linking Properties of Digital Artifacts with their Conceptualizations in Organizations. Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
2018Scrum in practice: an overview of Scrum adaptations
Seven motivations for modifying Scrum and six solution strategies, from 31 papers analysed.
The conference precursor to the JSS paper above. Same research question, smaller scope. The framework was already useful enough to be cited over a hundred times on its own. I kept the analysis going for four more years until it became the journal version.
Hron, M., & Obwegeser, N. (2018). Scrum in practice: an overview of Scrum adaptations. Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4496–4505.
Earlier work
Master’s thesis
A piece of work from before the PhD. It sits in the archive.
The paper received a revise-and-resubmit at the Strategic Management Journal special issue on platforms, which was a generous result for a master’s-level piece. I list it here because it is part of the work, even if it isn’t part of the record.
In motion
Under review
Junior consultants and generative AI
AI use pulls apart three things that ordinarily co-occur in early-career learning: internalising knowledge, producing legitimate work, and signalling competence. You can produce and signal without internalising.
When generative AI arrived, the consensus was that early-career consultants were the first to lose their jobs. They had jobs. With Emma Vaast, I interviewed forty junior consultants across three years to find out what they were actually doing. The paper develops a configurational theory of how AI use combines with apprenticeship, and maps which configurations are sustainable.
Hron, M., & Vaast, E. (under review, 3rd round). Configurational uses of generative AI in early-career consulting work. Journal of Information Technology.
Mirroring and multiplication in digital product development
The mirroring hypothesis, that organizational structure follows technical architecture, only holds when technical architecture is stable.
What if the drift paper’s case wasn’t an exception? This paper follows five other born-digital companies that launched derivative products as a kind of second breath in their development. It traces how organizational and technical architectures get rearranged together when a product splits or extends. When the technology is fluid, as digital artifacts are, the alignment gets reconstructed through clashes between user-group understandings and product structure.
In preparation
Organizing Visions and the Dialectic of Novelty and Control
The institutional dam does not block the river of hype. It supplies the resistance that converts chaotic energy into the directional power of mobilization.
The literature on technology discourse offers two answers to how speculative momentum interacts with institutional control. The suppression view says legitimation slows the river of hype. The decoupling view says control is performative and exerts no real friction on it. With Emma Vaast, using vector autoregression on 7,127 paragraphs of executive-facing AI discourse between 2014 and 2025, we find a third logic. This is also my entry into computationally intensive theory development, which I think will be a methodological home for some time.
Hron, M., & Vaast, E. (in preparation). Organizing Visions and the Dialectic of Novelty and Control: A Computationally Intensive Study of Executive-facing AI Discourse. Targeting MIS Quarterly.
Senior consultants and the practice of mentoring
When the artifact can be generated, it no longer reveals the underlying competence a mentor used to read through it.
The companion to the junior consultants paper. If juniors can produce and signal without internalising, what happens to the mentors? Senior consultants have historically read a junior’s draft and seen, through it, the underlying competence. The paper asks what mentoring becomes when artifacts no longer convey the competence they once did.
Ecosystem initiation under resource scarcity
The blueprint gets drawn, and then it breaks. The breaking provokes more construction. Structure and process alternate.
How do public-sector actors initiate digital ecosystems when the resources to plan a clean one are not there? Orthodox ecosystem-strategy literature treats this as a structural problem: pick the right architecture, line up the partners. In the public-administration cases I am following, that is not what happens. Strategy-as-practice gives me the vocabulary for the alternation.
Governance of battery remanufacturing ecosystems
What increases and diminishes value flows in battery remanufacturing ecosystems, and who is involved.
With collaborators at the CVAMO Lab (Flanders Make), we map value across the actors of the circular economy, from raw-material providers through to remanufacturers and end users. The work sits at the intersection of operations management, sustainability, and ecosystem governance.
