It-Enabled Business Innovation: Does CIO Capability Matter? A Perspective from Institutional Entrepreneurship Theory

Today IT has evolved from a mere efficiency tool to enabling business innovation and providing strategic value. As the highest level IT leader in organizations, CIO should be largely responsible for the success of IT-enabled business innovation. CIO must possess necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to lead IT staff, business partners, and even high-level executives in IT-enabled business innovation. However, as IT innovation researchers have just begun to look at business transformation and innovation resulted from the application of new IT, insights on how CIO can leverage IT to enable business innovation are still scant. We aim to address the question of whether and how CIO capability impact on the success of IT-enabled business innovation. Anchoring on the theory of institutional entrepreneurship, we propose a conceptual model describing that CIO’s political savvy, communicative ability, strategic IT and business knowledge have positive impact on the success of ITenabled business innovation, through the mediating role of innovation legitimacy. The findings are expected to provide several theoretical implications for the areas of IT innovation and CIO effectiveness.