Understanding the way information systems grow and change over time and the role of different contributors in these processes is central to current research on software development and innovation. In relation to this, there is an ongoing discourse on how the attributes of software platforms influence who can innovate on top of them and the kind of innovations possible within the larger ecosystem of technologies and people these platforms are part of. This discourse has paid limited attention to innovation unfolding in the fringes of the ecosystems peripheral to and disconnected from where the central software components are developed and where the resources necessary for digital innovation are scarce. Drawing upon Zittrain's characteristics of generativity and Lane's concept of generative relationships, the key contribution of this paper is a socio-technical perspective on innovation and generativity in this setting. We build this perspective of socio-technical generativity based on a case study of software innovation activities in Malawi on top of the health information system software platform DHIS2 developed in Norway. This case illustrates how the technical attributes of the platform played a key role in concert with human relationships in shaping innovation activities in Malawi.
The pervasiveness of digital platforms has resulted in the emergence of digital health platforms addressing various health care needs globally. Digital platforms, typically, bring about an international division of labor between platform owners in developed countries where they are usually developed and platform consumers in developing countries leveraging them. In this relationship, boundary resources, such as documentation and application programming interfaces, are critical elements in the efforts to leverage digital health platforms in developing countries. This paper uses the case of the digital health platform DHIS2 in Malawi to elucidate and discuss the enabling and restricting roles played by boundary resources towards efforts leveraging digital health platforms in developing countries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.