Seite - 35 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Information and Communications Technologies offer new opportunities to be creative innovel contexts and inways thatwerepreviously inaccessiblewithout the recent developments in technology. Admittedly, the term digital technologies is broader than ICT.Digital technologies exhibit numerous features that enable users to do things that could not be done as effectively, or at all, using other tools, and digital technologies provide features that can be further exploited byusers tomake a distinctive contribution to entrepreneurial activities (see Table 2). Digital technologies exhibit numerous features, as presented in Table 2, which enable entrepreneurs, employees andusers todo things that couldnotpreviouslybe done as effectively, or at all, using other less sophisticated tools. Next, we will elaborate on a variety of ways in which digital technology can enhance innovation by facilitating the conditions necessary for the development of employees’ creative ideas and the implementation of these ideas in organisations. Webegin by arguing that three conditions are necessary for employees to generate creative ideas (1) access and exposure to new and diverse information, (2) full engagement in the work role and (3) the experience of socioemotional or instru- mental support. We posit that the implementation of employees’ creative ideas requires the mobilisation of support and sponsorship of the ideas from credible allies.As such,wediscuss the possibility that digital technology shapes the degree of creativityof ideasgeneratedbyemployees and the implementationof these ideas by influencing each of these conditions. Digital technologies with the above- described features have also been used to support the early stages of imaginative Table 2 Distinguished features of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and the Internet of things, used to support creativity Feature Characteristics Automatic functions Selecting a variety of ideas or pre-screening processes Capacity and range Spacing theways inwhich it affords access tovast amounts of information locally and globally in different time zones and geographical places Evolvement Greater processing capacities, leading to dramatic price-performance improvements and lower costs Flexibility Easiness to use or reconfigure the data Interactivity Involving users at a number of levels, from the playing of a game, which gives feedback on decisionsmade, to the monitoring of a space probe through immediate and dynamic feedback is provided Provisionality Enabling users tomake changes, try alternatives and keep a ‘trace’ of the development of ideas Speed Allowing tasks of storing, transforming and displaying information to be carried out by the technologies, enabling users to read, observe, interrogate, interpret, analyse and synthesise information at higher levels Unpredictability/generativity Provoking changes in technologies’ overall capacity, which are driven by large audiences that can disrupt industries 36 R. D. Hisrich andM. Soltanifar