University of Colorado Denver Business School, offering Bachelor, MBA, MS, and PhD degrees

Information Technology and Intangible Output: The Impact of IT Investment on Innovation Productivity

Prior research concerning IT business value has established a link between firm-level IT investment and tangible returns like output productivity. Research also suggests that IT is vital to intermediate processes like those that produce intangible output. Among these, IT’s use in innovation and knowledge creation processes are perhaps the most critical to a firm’s long-term success. However, little is known about the relationship between IT, knowledge creation, and innovation output. In this study, we contribute to the literature by comprehensively examining IT’s contribution to innovation production across multiple contexts, using a quality-based measure of innovation output. Analyzing a panel of large U.S. manufacturing firms between 1987 and 1997, we find a 10% increase in IT input is associated with a 1.7% increase in innovation output for a given level of innovation-related spending. This relationship between IT, R&D and innovation production is robust across multiple econometric methodologies and found to be particularly strong in the mid to late 1990s, a period of rapid technological innovation. Our results also demonstrate the importance of IT in creating value at an intermediate stage of production, in this case, through improved innovation productivity. However, R&D and its related intangible factors (skill, knowledge, etc.) appear to play a more crucial role in the creation of breakthrough innovations. (Forthcoming ISR)

Resolving Divergence: How the Stakeholder Environment Moderates the Effects of Conflicting Performance Feedback on Organizational Change

 Organizations are typically evaluated across a variety of performance dimensions. But extant work on how organizational decision makers guide organizational change by integrating feedback about different types of performance fails to consider the organizational context. In the present study, we begin to address this weakness in the existing literature by explicitly examining how an organization’s stakeholder environment moderates the process through which decision makers respond to divergent performance feedback in managing organizational change. We test related hypotheses through a field study of divergent safety and financial performance feedback and organizational change in the U.S. railroad industry, finding support for the notion that decision makers consider external stakeholder assessments of organizational performance when determining appropriate responses to divergent performance feedback. 

Information Systems and Demand Volatility in Manufacturing: An Empirical Analysis of Environmental Contingencies to Value Creation

Information systems (IS) have enabled the transformation of supply chains. Prior research suggests that manufacturing plants facing higher demand volatility may benefit from tightly-coupled integration. We examine this thesis by analyzing the extent to which value generated by IS is contingent upon demand volatility. We employ a plant-level dataset comprising manufacturing plants with varying demand volatility to test developed hypotheses. Our first empirical result suggests that when faced with volatile demand, plants employing IS for information partnering with suppliers and customers experience positive and significant benefits to performance, in terms of both labor productivity and inventory turnover. In contrast, results suggest that plants employing IS for transaction efficiency in volatile environments do not experience such benefits. Our second main result indicates that in the context of demand volatility, these distinct applications of IS also have different performance implications within a plant’s value chain. Finally, our third result suggests that beyond internal impacts, demand volatility has differing implications for the value of these applications of IS in terms of competitive performance. Our research represents one of the first empirical analyses concerning the value of inter-organizational IS utilized for information partnering and transactions in manufacturing plants, under conditions of varying demand volatility.