Organizing for Digital Infrastructure Innovation: The Interplay of Initiated and Sustained Attention

This research takes an attention-based view of organizing to investigate digital infrastructure innovation. In our qualitative study of nine computationally-intensive research centers, we find that there appears to be a distinction between modes of attention: initiation and sustainment. Further, continual organizational innovation in digital infrastructure appears to require different skills, goals, and values and tends to involve different people. We conclude with a process view implied by this research whereby those who innovate during the initiation of attention have direct inducements in the domain the digital infrastructure supports. Innovators engaged in sustained attention, on the other hand, tend to have direct inducements in advancing high-performance computing.