Digital Infrastructure: A Service-dominant Logic Perspective

Owing to the rapid and unrelenting digitalization of business ecosystems, digital infrastructure—as a new information technology artifact to conceptualize and realize interconnected information system collectives—has drawn considerable attention in information systems research. Building on the extant body of knowledge, this study synthesizes and integrates existing discourses into a theoretical framework to contribute to the conceptualization of and to prospective theorizations on digital infrastructure. This theoretical framework follows distinctive assumptions of service-dominant logic to business ecosystems and accounts for socio-technical complexity of digital infrastructure to eventually derive six theoretical foundations of digital infrastructure. While three foundations (i.e., structural integrity, structural elasticity, and ambidexterity) reflect fundamental bases of digital infrastructure, the other three foundations (i.e., connectivity, generativity, and modularity) reflect underlying mechanisms that cause and shape digital infrastructure’s fundamental bases. These insights represent an overall study’s first step whose next steps and the expected outcomes are also discussed.