Abstract
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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.