Academic agility in digital innovation research: the case of mobile ICT publications within information systems 2000–2014

The Information Systems (IS) field has never been more relevant as digital innovations are emerging at a rapid pace fuelled by recombinant innovations based on digital infrastructures, advanced middle-ware layers, and mobile and ubiquitous technologies. This paper argues, based on a bibliometric study of the representation of a mobile ICT discourse within the AIS Senior Scholars’ ‘basket’ of eight IS journals over the past 15 years, that the field needs to become much more academically agile. The study showed that a mere 3.2% of all papers published during this period had any relationship to one of the key technological phenomena in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The paper formulates the hypothesis that the relative shift in impact between European- and US-based journals within the ‘basket of 8’ could have been influenced by editorial strategising to further encourage academic agility exploring new horizons rather than emphasis on further exploitation of existing ground. The paper, further argues that the IS field seems to more readily engage in a debate of phenomena involving centralised and organisationally-bound technological innovations whereas distributed, decentralised and infrastructural discourses find it much more difficult to gain a foothold. So, whilst the IS field may still be stuck in the mainframe age, it needs to move beyond in order to fully engage with the world we live in.