Track Chairs

Michel Avital, University of Amsterdam

Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University and University of Jyväskylä

Track Description

Overall, innovation is about spanning or breaking the prevailing boundaries. Innovation has been always an underlying leitmotif in the study of information systems, let alone the driving force of the ICT industry and the raison d’etre of the talented people who have lead the digital revolution. In most instances, innovation is about pragmatic novelty that connotes progress, value, and positive change. Yet in spite of unprecedented growth of verbiage on IT innovation in the scholarly and popular discourses as well as the ever-growing stream of IT innovation in the marketplace, its added value to humanity and its impact on the state of the world remain unclear.

In this track, we adopt a broad view that maintains information systems as technically grounded socio-semiotic systems. Accordingly, IT innovation refers to constructing new desirable alternatives that are created by shaping social, physical, semiotic and technological environments via intentional IT-oriented design acts. This view treats IT innovation as an inclusive open-ended process (and not merely as a concrete outcome or a finite object) that purposefully seeks to shape our cognitive, semiotic, social or physical environment through reconfiguration of technical artifacts and interaction with boundary processes and situated practices.

The conference theme, ICT and Sustainable Service Development, calls for a broader and inclusive view of IS scholarship that aspires to foster environmental, economic and social value and to suggest ways of using information technology for providing leverage and fulfilling human needs. Articles can apply any consistent theoretical frame, methodology, or unit of analysis. Both theoretical essays and empirical studies are equally sought. Innovative approaches to the study of IT innovation and related phenomena are particularly welcome. We envision a general track on innovation that is opened for a broad range of research and can consolidate all related work into a rich repertoire on innovation in the context of information technology. Representative topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Innovation theory, models, and practices relevant for information systems
• Researching innovation, methods, tools and theory building
• Innovative approaches to the study of innovation
• Requirements for systems and environments that support innovation
• Generative capacity, creativity and other enablers of innovation
• Design and innovation
• Open innovation
• Mass innovation
• Sustainable innovation
• Social innovation and ICT
• Sociomateriality of innovation
• Service innovation
• Economics of innovation
• Anti-innovation perspectives
• Utopian view of visionary worlds—exploring, generating and excluding of futures
• Unintended consequences of innovation—from serendipitous to undesired outcomes

Associate Editors

Michael Barrett, University of Cambridge, UK

Nick Berente, University of Georgia, USA

Jason Dedrick, Syracuse University, USA

Jos van Hillegersberg, University of Twente, Netherlands

Marleen Huysman, Free University, Netherlands

Jannis Kallinikos, London School of Economics, UK

Karlheinz Kautz, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Jan Marco Leimeister, Universität Kassel, Germany

Mikael Lind, Viktoria Institute, Sweden

Claudia Loebbecke, University of Cologne, Germany

John Mooney, Pepperdine University, USA

Ojelanki Ngwenyama, Ryerson University, Canada

Yves Pigneur, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland

Keng Siau, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Carsten Sorensen, London School of Economics, UK

Francesco Virili, Universita’ degli Studi di Cassino, Italy

Erik de Vries, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Eric Wang, National Central University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Stephanie Watts, Boston University, USA

Tim Weitzel, Bamberg University, Germany

Rolf Wigand, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA

Volker Wulf, University of Siegen, Germany