Historical accounts of human achievement suggest that accidents can play an important role in innovation. In this paper, we seek to contribute to an understanding of how digital systems might support valuable unpredictability in innovation processes by examining how innovators who obtain value from accidents integrate unpredictability into their work. We describe an inductive, grounded theory project, based on 20 case studies, that looks into the conditions under which people who make things keep their work open to accident, the degree to which they rely on accidents in their work, and how they incorporate accidents into their deliberate processes and arranged surroundings. By comparing makers working in varied conditions, we identify specific factors (e.g., technologies, characteristics of technologies) that appear to support accidental innovation. We show that makers in certain specified conditions not only remain open to accident but also intentionally design their processes and surroundings to invite and exploit valuable accidents. Based on these findings, we offer advice for the design of digital systems to support innovation processes that can access valuable unpredictability.

An agency framework is used to model the behavior of software developers as they weigh concerns about product quality against concerns about missing individual task deadlines. Developers who care about quality but fear the career impact of missed deadlines may take “shortcuts.” Managers sometimes attempt to reduce this risk via their deadline-setting policies; a common method involves adding slack to best estimates when setting deadlines to partially alleviate the time pressures believed to encourage shortcut-taking. This paper derives a formal relationship between deadline-setting policies and software product quality. It shows that: (1) adding slack does not always preserve quality, thus, systematically adding slack is an incomplete policy for minimizing costs; (2) costs can be minimized by adopting policies that permit estimates of completion dates and deadlines that are different and; (3) contrary to casual intuition, shortcut-taking can be eliminated by setting deadlines aggressively, thereby maintaining or even increasing the time pressures under which developers work.

The last decade has seen a remarkable opening of new job opportunities for people who are neurodiversea subset of the general population that historically has experienced un-and underemployment rates as high as 85-90% (Roux et al., 2015;Taylor & Seltzer, 2011). Neurodiversity takes neurological developments traditionally regarded as atypical or even as diagnosable disorders, such as autism or dyslexia, and conceptualizes them as normal human variation (Jaarsma & Welin, 2012). Proponents of this perspective suggest that many neurodiverse people possess useful talents and are capable of functioning productively in organizations, but are barred from work opportunities because they are, as exemplars of human variation, 'at the edges of the bell curve' (Robison, 2013). The problem, according to this view, is not with neurodiverse people, but with hiring processes that define talent too narrowly, and especially with reliance on job interviews, which are biased against people with atypical manners of interaction. This view accords with early criticisms of employment perspectives viewing diversity as 'the problem' rather than the problem as inappropriate management of diversity (see Härtel & Fujimoto, 2000). Despite slow uptake of this alternative inclusive view of diversity, its validity is being established with prominent companies, such as SAP, Microsoft, DXC Technology, EY, JP Morgan Chase, and Ford, implementing since 2013 employment initiatives that de-emphasize interviews in favor of new inclusive recruiting approaches that have led to celebrated successes in hiring neurodiverse people. In this special issue, we examine some of the primary benefits that firms have realized as well as the challenges they encountered along the way, underscoring the urgent need for researchers and practitioners alike to identify how employment practices can be transformed to be inclusive for all individuals (cf. Härtel & Ashkanasy, 2011). In this special issue and our introduction to it, we look at the benefits of these new initiatives to the individual, as well as their societal and potential firm or business benefits.From the perspective of individuals, work is an integral part of life, providing individuals both economic security and the context in which they can contribute their talents and skills to society and thus anchor themselves in a social role (Saleh & Bruyere, 2018). Research shows that having a job is an important determinant of self-esteem and provides a critical link between an individual and society (Doyle, Kavanagh, Metcalfe, & Lavin, 2005). The World Health Organization (WHO) affirms this idea, proclaiming that 'although it is difficult to quantify the impact of work alone on personal identity, self-esteem and social recognition, most mental health professionals agree that the workplace environment can have a significant impact on an individual's mental well-being' (Harnois & Gabriel, 2000: 5). The WHO recognizes that employment provides time structure, social contact, collective effort and purpose, social identity...

In recent years, flexibility has emerged as a divisive issue in discussions about the appropriate design of processes for making software. Partisans in both research and practice argue for and against plan-based (allegedly inflexible) and agile (allegedly too flexible) approaches. The stakes in this debate are high; questions raised about plan-based approaches undermine longstanding claims that those approaches, when realized, represent maturity of practice. In this commentary, we call for research programs that will move beyond partisan disagreement to a more nuanced discussion, one that takes into account both benefits and costs of flexibility. Key to such programs will be the development of a robust contingency framework for deciding when (in what conditions) plan-based and agile methods should be used. We develop a basic contingency framework in this paper, one that models the benefit/cost economics described in narratives about the transition from craft to industrial production of physical products. We use this framework to demonstrate the power of even a simple model to help us accomplish three objectives: (1) to refocus discussions about the appropriate design of software development processes, concentrating on when to use particular approaches and how they might be usefully combined; (2) to suggest and guide a trajectory of research that can support and enrich this discussion; and (3) to suggest a technology-based explanation for the emergence of agile development at this point in history. Although we are not the first to argue in favor of a contingency perspective, we show that there remain many opportunities for information systems (IS) research to have a major impact on practice in this area.

Research on creative organizations often highlights a concern that economic influences on creative work might crowd out aesthetic influences. How this concern can be managed, however, is not well understood. Using a case study of an economic/aesthetic conflict within e-Types, a design firm, we develop theory to describe how the economic and aesthetic can be constructively combined. Building from grounded empirical analysis, we propose the concept of conversation as a way of theorizing about a constructed sociality via which creative firms can manage this conflict. "Converse," according to etymology, means "to live with"; the archaic meaning is "to become occupied or engaged." To say, then, that the economic and aesthetic remained conversant at e-Types through controversy is, we demonstrate, richly descriptive and generative of additional implications. In a similar way, we propose the concept of ensemble -an idea borrowed from the collaborative arts -as a way of theorizing about a conversationally nurtured but fragile form of intensified sociality that is not always achieved, but that most successfully combines conflicting influences when it is. Our findings and theoretical conceptualizations contribute new insights and a framework for organizing a fragmented landscape of ideas about creative work.