Publication

Digital innovation entails the combining of digital and physical components to produce novel products.  The materiality of digital artifacts, particularly the separation between their material and immaterial  features, which is expressed through a layered architecture, lays the foundation for the generative  potential of digital innovation. Gaining an understanding of the work involved in creating such a layered  architecture and tracing the shifts in the material sub-stratum as physical products are digitalized  provides insight into the organizational implications of digital innovation. To this end, we study the  digitalization of the automobile by focusing on the evolution of a car manufacturer’s instrument cluster or  Driver Information Module (DIM) from 2005 onwards. Based on laddering interviews with 20 people  involved in the development of three increasingly digitized DIMs, this paper traces the progressive  dissociation between the material and non-material aspects of digitalized artifacts and the organizational  implications of evolving a modular layered architecture