Digital Infrastructure for Development: The Case of Mobile Money in Kenya Completed Research

Digital innovation, enabled by digital technologies, holds the potential to transform existing socioeconomic practices, processes, and structures. Despite much theory and evidence on digital innovation and organizational transformation, the connections between digital innovation and societal transformation are little known. In particular, the research on how digital innovation enables society-wide development in developing countries is lacking. Drawing on digital infrastructure literature, we propose an infrastructural view of digital innovation. Given its generative nature, we theorize that digital infrastructure contributes to development through a range of varied digital innovations across diverse sectors, which help address societal problems and precipitate developmental outcomes over time. Using mobile money in Kenya as a revelatory case, we lay out the evidence that supports and illustrates our theorizing of digital infrastructure for development in developing countries. This paper contributes to several research streams in the information systems (IS) field.