Bringing Is Innovation in a Highly-regulated Environment: a Collective Action Perspective

The main question addressed in this paper is how to bring IS innovation in a highly regulated environment. The major challenge is that in domains that are highly regulated (such as Customs, Energy, and Healthcare), legal requirements often hinder the innovation process and the subsequent adoption of innovation. While adoption and diffusion of innovation has been the subject of extensive discussion in the context of IS, theories predominantly follow the rational positivistic perspective, focussing on variables which can predict the rate of diffusion and adoption. Such approaches remain static and fail to capture the complex social processes that would need to be mobilized to bring the desired change. Moreover, they do not pay specific attention to existing regulatory regimes that may need to be changed to create grounds for the further adoption of the innovation. To address these limitations, we apply the collective action model for institutional innovation (Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006). Through our interpretive case study from the domain of eCustoms we are able to demonstrate the applicability of this alternative model to explain IS innovation, by showing how processes such as framing contests, mobilization of networks, utilization of political opportunities and engagement in collective action processes form an integral part of the institutional innovation process. The contribution of this paper is as follows. First of all, we apply a highly conceptual model borrowed from the organizational science field to analyse a real life case. We demonstrate the applicability of this model to explain processes of bringing IS innovation in a highly regulated context (eCustoms). By doing so, we contribute a new perspective for analyzing IS innovation, which can be seen as complementary to the theories traditionally used in the IS domain. Second, we propose several extensions of the model, based on our empirical findings. On the practical side, this paper brings insights to the processes that practitioners would need to take into account, when attempting to bring IS innovation in a highly regulated environment.