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Infobesity is a condition whereby firms collect more information than they need or more information than they can efficiently use. As both incumbent firms and new entrant firms face different information-rich technological and economic environments, they are at a greater risk of infobesity which can compromise their innovation outcomes. In this study we leverage a research design that integrates inductive analytics and abductive discovery to uncover how incumbent and new-entrant firms leverage Business Intelligence systems and digital collaboration activities to innovate in the face of infobesity. We find that new entrant firms encounter a threshold effect governed by the use of BI systems to filter information from their customer network. On the other hand, we found that while most incumbents are able to innovate, there are uninventive incumbents that are unable to develop new products when they deploy only moderate levels of BI systems to filter their supplier data.

Globalized firms maintain a presence across multiple countries encompassing multiple cultures. Cross-border, multicultural firms can leverage digital technologies to harness diverse information spread across the organization to generate insights and innovation. Conversely, digital technologies can cause organizations to suffer from infobesity. We examine this dialectic tension in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We theorize that multicultural firms exhibited better performance, assessed through market measures, during the onset of the pandemic. We further maintain that the use of digital technologies to generate insights from data has a negative effect on the relationship between multiculturism and firm performance due to infobesity. Analysis of Fortune 500 firms, having 56,587 subsidiaries present in 179 distinct countries, demonstrates that multicultural firms witnessed relatively superior stock market returns during the first quarter of 2020. We make significant contributions to information systems and crosscultural research and to broader inter-disciplinary management research.