A FRAMEWORK FOR THE STRATEGIC POSITIONING OF INTRA-COMPANY ICT RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS

By the early twentieth century, Schumpeter had already stressed the importance of innovation for a sustainable development of enterprises. Innovation is especially important for information and com-munication technology (ICT) companies as their business model is based on rapidly changing tech-nology. They therefore often profit from innovation developed in intra-company research organiza-tions. However, ICT research organisations often face a special challenge: the integration of research results into existing ICT architectures. This challenge has neither been analysed in literature on in-formation systems nor on innovation management. In order to gain a deeper understanding of this challenge, we analysed case studies in four intra-company research organisations, among them one in-depth case study. Our research shows that an intra-company ICT research organisation can make a decision based on three important strategic parameters: (a) the desired degree of innovativeness, (b) the desired degree of integrability into existing architecture, and (c) the desired degree of orientation towards prospective users’ needs. Based on our case study analysis, we argue that these three strate-gic goals are concurrent, i.e. to achieve one of them makes it difficult to achieve the others. Adhering to contingency theory, we believe that there is not one best strategic position, but that the quality of a strategic position depends on environmental contingency factors. In addition to the development of the framework, we consider contingency theory and formulate two hypothetical propositions. They de-scribe stable strategic positions of intra-company ICT research organisations in our framework, de-pendent on contingency factors...