MG472      Half Unit
Management and Socioeconomics of Digital Innovation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Requisites

Additional requisites:

This course is is designed for students who have a strong interest in digital innovation and some prior exposure, e.g. through study, work experience, or independent learning, to core information and communication technologies and their use in organisational settings.

This course explores how organisations create value from digital innovation. We will adopt a sociotechnical perspective, which means that we treat technologies not as standalone tools, but as systems embedded in economic logics and organisational practices. Digital innovation only produces value when technical capabilities, business models, and work processes are aligned. However, this alignment is often fragile, contested, and evolving. We examine how organizations can cope with such issues.

In lectures, we will explore how digital innovations are managed, adopted, and transformed across different organisational contexts. To do this will engage with core economic ideas like transaction costs and open business models; technical ideas such as algorithmic learning, and interoperability; and organisational concepts including collaboration and decision-making. In seminars, these ideas will be applied to real-world cases, such as platform businesses and algorithmic decision systems in operations.

By the end of the course, students will be able to analyse how digital innovation creates (or fails to create) value, understand the conditions that shape this process, and critically assess the strategic and organisational choices involved.

Specifically, students will be able to:

1. Define and explain the concept of digital innovation and its role in shaping contemporary organisational and economic dynamics.
2. Apply key theories and frameworks from management, economics, and information systems to analyse digital innovation.
3. Evaluate how value is created (or constrained) through the interaction of technical capabilities, business models, and organisational practices.
4. Analyse real-world cases using concepts such as transaction costs, interoperability, algorithmic decision-making, and collaborative infrastructures.
5. Make strategic recommendations for managing digital innovation based on sociotechnical and contextual analysis.

1.5 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.
15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

In its Ethics Code, LSE upholds a commitment to intellectual freedom. This means we will protect the freedom of expression of our students and staff and the right to engage in healthy debate in the classroom.

Classes are based around reading and discussing selected journal articles from the course reading list. Formative feedback is provided on a mock examination, with questions from MG472, MG481 and MG487.

• Cordella, A., & Gualdi, F. (2024). Regulating generative AI: The limits of technology-neutral regulatory frameworks. Insights from Italy's intervention on ChatGPT. Government Information Quarterly, 41(4), 101982. 
• De Reuver, M., Sørensen, C., & Basole, R. C. (2018). The digital platform: a research agenda. Journal of information technology, 33(2), 124-135.
• Diriker, D., Porter, A. J., & Tuertscher, P. (2023). Orchestrating open innovation through punctuated openness: A process model of open organizing for tackling wicked multi-stakeholder problems. Organization Studies, 44(1), 135-157.
• Faraj, S., & Pachidi, S. (2021). Beyond Uberization: The co-constitution of technology and organizing. Organization Theory, 2(1), 2631787721995205.
• Yoo, Y., Henfridsson, O., Kallinikos, J., Gregory, R., Burtch, G., Chatterjee, S., & Sarker, S. (2024). The next frontiers of digital innovation research. Information Systems Research, 35(4), 1507-1523.

Suggested readings to be done on a weekly basis to build up general knowledge:

• The Economist – weekly news and regular relevant special studies.
• The Financial Times – daily world commentary, regular regional/ theme special issues and archive.
• The Wall Street Journal – detailed daily world commentary.

Some journals that students may wish to search for additional articles on globalisation, business strategy, management and digital business are:

• Academy of Management Executive
• Journal of Management Studies
• Management Information Systems Quarterly
• Journal of Strategic Information Systems
• Organization Science
• Harvard Business Review
• Sloan Management Review
• California Management Review

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period