| Sustained competitiveness in a global marketplace demands continuous, holistic, and rapid innovation of eternally fresh digital offerings. Such intense, non-stop innovation is very difficult to achieve. The Strategic Emerging Digital Technology (SEDT) driving this endless cycle of innovation, perpetually produces a vast digital ecosystem of innovation's by-products (digital artifacts) that could be recombined to create new innovative digital offerings. Research has not addressed how digital artifacts can be abstracted and recombined in digital tools to conceptualize new innovative digital services. Effectively addressing this complex issue required a holistic approach that considered the outcomes, mechanisms, and information technology (IT) actors involved in: abstracting digital artifacts, delivering abstracted digital objects to a digital tool, using a digital tool to mix and match (recombine) abstracted digital objects, and producing a concept specification that represents recombining abstracted digital objects. This grounded theory study used existing knowledge presented in technical literature from ten research areas, and the online survey responses of fifteen IT consultants with knowledge of digital services, to construct a broad conceptual framework. The Continuous, Holistic, Radical, Recombinative Innovation Sandbox (CHRRIS) Framework, comprised of 36 propositions and six dimensions, explains how digital by-products (digital artifacts) could be abstracted and used in a digital sandbox to conceptualize new innovative digital offerings. Practitioners in IT consultancies can use portions of this theory to guide construction of holistic digital services for their clients. Practitioners and academia can use this theory to jointly construct a platform for continuous, holistic, radical, recombinative innovation that serves global business. |
