Publications

PhD dissertation · 2022 · Aarhus University

The dissertation. It argues that 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.

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2022 · Journal of Systems and Software · with Nikolaus Obwegeser

Where I discovered I have an eye for synthesis. The work started in a master thesis project. With Nikolaus Obwegeser, we mapped 963 papers on how and why Scrum gets modified in actual organizations as a systematic review. I kept pushing on the analysis and the writing for years. This is the paper I love for the craft.

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Selected 2021 · Innovation: Organization & Management · with Nikolaus Obwegeser and Sune Dueholm Müller

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. In a separate-organization study we show how digital resources leak across organizational boundaries and erode the very separation meant to incubate the new. 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.

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2021 · Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-54) · sole author

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. The paper links properties of digital artifacts to the frames that put them to use as options, resources, or experiences.

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2018 · Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-51) · with Nikolaus Obwegeser

The conference precursor to the JSS paper above. Same research question, smaller scope: 31 papers analysed, seven motivations for Scrum modification, six solution strategies. 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.

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Under review · with Nikolaus Obwegeser and Sune Dueholm Müller

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. The mirroring hypothesis, that organizational structure follows technical architecture, only holds when technical architecture is stable. When the technology is fluid, as digital artifacts are, the alignment gets reconstructed through clashes between user-group understandings and product structure. The paper has been under review for a long time. We are still pushing.

Selected Under review, 3rd round · Journal of Information Technology · with Emma Vaast

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. Three things ordinarily co-occur in early-career learning: internalising knowledge, producing legitimate work, and signalling competence through the artifact. AI use pulls them apart. You can produce and signal without internalising. The paper maps which configurations are sustainable.

Selected In preparation · Targeting MIS Quarterly · with Emma Vaast

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.

The institutional dam does not block the river of hype. It supplies the resistance that converts chaotic energy into the directional power of mobilization.

This is also my entry into computationally intensive theory development, which I think will be a methodological home for some time.

Data collection underway

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. When the artifact can be generated, that diagnostic link breaks. The paper asks what mentoring becomes when artifacts no longer convey the competence they once did.

Data collection underway · 32 of 40 interviews complete · Digital Kiosks project (Interreg Europe)

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, the blueprint gets drawn, and then it breaks. The breaking provokes more construction. Structure and process alternate. Strategy-as-practice gives me the vocabulary for the alternation.

In preparation · Systematic literature review · with collaborators at the CVAMO Lab (Flanders Make)

A literature review of value flows in battery remanufacturing ecosystems. With collaborators at the CVAMO Lab (Flanders Make), we map what increases value across the actors of the circular economy, from raw-material providers through to remanufacturers and end users, what diminishes it, and who is involved. The work sits at the intersection of operations management, sustainability, and ecosystem governance.

Master’s thesis · Year to be confirmed · R&R at Strategic Management Journal special issue on platforms

A piece of work from before the PhD. 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 did not have the support or experience at the time to push it through to publication. It sits in the archive. I list it here because it is part of the work, even if it isn’t part of the record.