Publications of Ferdinand Mittermeier

Conference Articles (Peer Reviewed)

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)

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

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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 82. 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)