“Digital bricolage”: how far can you go and what are the risks?

You don’t need a five‑year roadmap and a huge budget to build effective digital solutions. Even companies with limited resources can adapt, repurpose and combine tools they already have through “digital bricolage”. Yet this DIY approach also comes with limits and risks. Two articles written by NEOMA’s Aljona Zorina and Stefan Markovic show how this process plays out in two specific but very different contexts: micro-enterprises in Ghana and industrial digital platforms in Serbia. 

The term “bricolage” often carries negative connotations, suggesting a quick, makeshift fix that produces a second-rate, short‑lived solution. In the world of business, however, digital bricolage has been gaining momentum in recent years and is now attracting growing interest from managers and researchers alike. 

Pragmatic, flexible and creative

The umbrella term bricolage covers a wide range of practices and refers to a constructive approach that combines pragmatism, flexibility and creativity. It addresses a recurring problem: when a company decides to digitise its operations, the ideal conditions – a clear strategy, multi-year planning, a sizeable budget and state-of-the-art tools – are almost never in place. 

Digital bricolage asks an organisation to rethink its goals, “make do” with what it already has and pursue unorthodox forms of innovation so that it does not miss out on the potential benefits of digital technology, such as value co-creation, increased competitiveness and access to new markets. 

Repurposing free tools in Ghana…

The first of the two articles looks at these digital practices in 45 micro‑enterprises in Ghana, where the lack of resources is particularly striking: annual turnover below $25,000, no access to the banking system, no legal status and, as a consequence, no eligibility for state support. 

Oscillating between staying afloat and limited growth, these micro‑enterprises sell clothing, food, electronics, cosmetics and similar products, together accounting for 2.5 million jobs or 18% of the Ghanaian workforce.

Bricolage is an essential phase in digitising certain aspects of their business. In its simplest form, this means repurposing free tools, modifying them and combining them for commercial ends. For example, equipped with nothing more than a smartphone (ownership in Ghana is above 100%) and private WhatsApp, Facebook or Instagram accounts, these micro-enterprises can sell products online, process orders and take payments – all without using a PC.

… or combining free and professional tools

Some of these small companies build more sophisticated bricolage systems, investing in online advertising, creating a website or adopting a robust payment solution to guard against fraud. But given their limited resources, they continue using free tools in parallel and soon run up against their limitations: the inability to generate customer lists, for example, or the need to manage stock manually.

Only a handful of micro-enterprises, buoyed by strong market prospects, manage to implement professional solutions for the majority of tasks. But pockets of bricolage persist: some businesses still handle financial flows on their smartphones, whereas others generate invoices in Word without linking them to their bookkeeping.

Platform bricolage as a collaborative model for innovation in Serbia

The second article, which focuses on three Serbian industrial digital platforms, describes a very different version of digital bricolage: SMEs pool their diverse but limited financial, human and technological resources to build a collaborative innovation system, with each SME contributing its own piece to the puzzle.

These platforms relieve each SME of the need to invest individually in full, ready‑to‑use digital solutions, while giving them access to a tool that none of them could afford on their own.

The underlying logic is no longer rooted in makeshift improvisation, but in the invention of a new business model. In fact, the three platforms in the study are experiencing spectacular growth, even though they are driven by SMEs in a country with limited access to major financial instruments.

One of the platforms, for instance, supplies professional apps (ranging from e‑commerce to warehouse management and chatbots) hosted entirely in the cloud. The SME behind the site handles development, governance, technical support and software selection; publishers design, maintain and upgrade it; and customers use it, share their feedback and suggest new features.

Customers actively participating in the innovation process

This platform bricolage has its own distinctive set of practices. One is the clear division of resources, tasks and responsibilities; in other words, everyone knows exactly what they have to do. Another involves repurposing existing tools, rather than acquiring new resources, to address emerging uses. A further characteristic is transparent communication between partners, which promotes trust, facilitates collaboration and stimulates knowledge sharing.

Likewise, these platforms position their customers as fully-fledged participants in the system. They provide them with cutting-edge technical support, encourage them to share their needs and difficulties, leverage their suggestions and co-create and validate new products with them. These stakeholders directly influence the innovation process.

When bricolage solutions turn into a trap

Digital bricolage, however, is not a perfect system. The authors draw attention to possible adverse effects and risks, framing them as critical warning signals for entrepreneurs. 

In the Ghanaian micro-enterprises, bricolage solutions rely on a narrow range of technologies, which are further limited by the poor functionality of free versions. As a result, mobile‑money transactions (deposits, transfers and smartphone payments outside the banking system) are capped, which slows revenue growth.

These ad-hoc solutions do not communicate with each other, even though tool integration is one of the key drivers of digital performance. They are designed and maintained by a single person – often the owner – and they disappear as soon as that individual leaves. Furthermore, they are not as robust, adaptable and scalable as their commercial equivalents.

Although digital bricolage has the advantage of providing short-term agility, it can stifle micro-enterprises aiming for sustainable growth – a phenomenon that the researchers describe as the “digital bricolage trap.”

Industrial digital platforms: preventing inertia from overcoming momentum

With industrial digital platforms, which are driven by a much more powerful dynamic, leaders must monitor other risk factors. These include finding the right balance of collective governance rules, which must structure and align collaborative practices – so that efforts do not become fragmented – without killing creativity and innovation in the bud. 

There is another pitfall: bricolage-induced inertia – the inability of intensive bricolage practitioners to raise their game to attract more challenging clients and work with better qualified suppliers. As explained above, the platform makes use of available resources to respond to incoming requests. The risk is expending too much energy, becoming discouraged and abandoning innovative solutions in favour of fixes that are no more than adequate. 

It follows that it is up to platform managers to uphold demanding quality standards, get new ideas off the ground, capitalise on customer feedback and streamline communication between stakeholders.

In both Ghana and Serbia, digital bricolage is proving to be highly effective in the short term for driving innovation in spite of scarce resources. But over the long term, its inherent limitations can slow this momentum. The real test for entrepreneurs is ensuring that inertia does not eventually stall the initial momentum of their initiatives.

Find out more

Stan Karanasios, P. K. Senyo, Aljona Zorina and John Effah, Digital Bricolage and Its Limits: How Microenterprises Undertake Digitalization in Resource-Constrained Environments, Information Systems Research, August 2025. doi/10.1287/isre.2023.0193

Nikolina Koporcic, Stefan Markovic, Vesna Damnjanovic and Helen Perks, Platform Bricolage as an Approach for Industrial Digital Platform‐Based Innovation, Journal of Product Innovation Management, February 2026. doi.org/10.1111/jpim.70024