Innovation within an early childhood education and care organisation: a tri-perspective analysis of the appropriation of IT

Empirical studies on information technology (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, 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.