A Mathematical Theory to Evaluate Disruptive Changes Deductively

Abstract

Digital transformation, known as DX, is gaining a lot of attention in a variety of organizations, and higher education institutions are experiencing such rapid changes. IR sections in them, therefore, have to support and evaluate their trials for such rapid changes. Although a popular approach to evaluating trials is to use data about them, in the case of trials aiming for disruptive changes, it is important to evaluate them beforehand since such a trial can be too costly and its impact can be serious damage to institutions. However, it is intrinsically difficult to deal with such changes since we need not have enough data beforehand. This paper is devoted to developing a framework, which can be used to evaluate such disruptive changes. The main idea for the framework is that our daily behaviors are defined as a theory from the perspective of information dissemination. Using the proposed framework, we derive some findings deductively, which are not obvious from existing approaches. Thus we can conclude that the proposed framework is fruitful. These findings include that in- formation dissemination is derived to create disruptive changes, although our basic notions do not include being disruptive. We can also show that dissemination can cause a succes- sive cascade and the proposed model can explain the reason why resistance to new changes occurs. These findings can not be obtained from existing defitions for disruptive changes, such as DX. The main contribution of this paper is to show a deductive approach, which is not popular in IR, is effective in evaluating such disruptive changes.