Innovation within an Early Childhood Education and Care Organisation: A Tri-Perspective Analysis of the Appropriation of IT
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Abstract
Empirical studies on IT in early childhood are scant, despite an increasing number of early childhood education and care organisations choosing to innovate with IT. This paper presents a framework to understand the appropriation of IT as an innovation within such an organisation. The framework consists of three perspectives on innovation: an individualist, a structuralist and an interactive process perspective. While the first focuses on concepts such as leadership, IT champions, previous IT exposure, the second focuses on organisation size, parents as stakeholders, competitors and government compliance and regulatory requirements. The third perspective views the innovation as a dynamic, continuous phenomenon of change, produced by the continuous interaction of the innovation content, its context, and the appropriation process as related in an interactive process. We demonstrate the framework’s applicability and determine that the three perspectives supplement each other and together provide a deeper understanding of the IT appropriation process.