Anticipating the Digital: How Interpretive Debt and Layered Architectural Framing Shape Innovation Pathways

How does an organization’s prior experience with digital innovation shape its pursuit of new digital technologies? Accumulated experience can enable innovation through infrastructure, learning, and interpretive schemas, but it can also constrain it through technical debt, myopia, and entrenched frames. Yet how such experience operates within the layered modular architectures that characterize digital technologies remains undertheorized. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of two municipal water agencies initiating Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) “smart meter” systems, this study examines how prior digital innovation experience shapes innovation pathways during initiation. Despite similar contexts, the agency with extensive digital metering experience framed AMI narrowly as a hardware replacement to stabilize failing infrastructure, while the agency with no prior digital metering experience framed it expansively as a platform for data-driven organizational transformation. To explain this divergence, the study introduces the concept of interpretive debt—the accumulated interpretive obligations incurred through past innovation experience that bind organizational attention to specific architectural layers, settling what a technology fundamentally is and narrowing recognition of new possibilities before they are encountered. The study further advances technology framing theory through the concept of layered architectural framing, shifting the central question from how organizations interpret new digital technologies to where in the architecture that interpretation falls. These framings materialize through anticipatory practices—organizational actions that restructure the present based on projected futures prior to procurement—converting interpretive orientations into organizational fact and setting innovation pathways in motion before technologies arrive. Together, these concepts reconceptualize digital innovation initiation as a performative, layer-specific process through which past experience shapes which futures become organizationally possible.

History: Sundeep Sahay, Senior Editor; Robert Gregory, Associate Editor.

Funding: This work was supported by National Science Foundation [Grant SES-1057148, SES-2051896].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2024.1339.