Attention to Digital Innovation: Exploring the Impact of a Chief Information Officer in the Top Management Team
基于注意力基础观，研究CIO在高层管理团队中的存在是否提升企业的数字专利活动和新产品数字化水平，并分析CEO特征和行业IT注意力的调节作用。
We draw on the attention-based view of the firm to examine whether and when the presence of a CIO in the TMT has a positive effect on both firms’ ideated digital innovation (IDI) (i.e., the intensity of firms’ digital patenting activity) and commercialized digital innovation (CDI) (i.e., the digital sophistication of firms’ new products). Building on the idea that attention processes are context dependent, we also explore the moderating roles of CEO characteristics (IT background and role tenure) as well as environmental characteristics (the industry’s IT attention). We analyze data from a cross-industry panel of U.S. S&P 500 firms over eight years that includes up to 2,852 firm-year observations. The results indicate that CIO presence in the TMT is positively related to a firm’s IDI and CDI. Furthermore, they show that the organizational context related to CEO characteristics moderates the CIO-CDI relationship and that the environmental context related to the industry’s IT attention moderates the CIO-IDI relationship. Our research contributes to the information systems literature by providing robust evidence that CIO presence in the TMT positively influences a firm’s digital innovation outcomes, showing how internal and external boundary conditions affect the work of CIOs, and elaborating the role of managerial attention as an underlying mechanism explaining digital innovation.