PhD student Dennis Gan from DIGENT participated at the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC) in Boston, Massachusetts (United States) this month. BCERC was founded in 1981 by Babson College and is considered by many to be the premier entrepreneurship research conference in the world. Proceedings from the Conference are found at the Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research compilation.

Gan presented at the BCERC 2019 the paper INCUMBENTS AND STARTUPS: ON COLLISION COURSE, authored by him and Steffen Korsgaard.

The abstract of the paper follows:

Despite the promise of complementary resources between incumbents and startups when they enter into strategic alliances, many alliances often end prematurely. This study explores the occurrences of conflicts between incumbents and startups by drawing upon justice theory. We conducted 26 interviews with executives from incumbents, startups, and incubators on their past five doomed strategic alliances. Our findings show that the procedures for incumbents and startups to collaborate are not in place yet (procedural justice) and there is a lack of transparency behind the incumbents’ motives to engage with the startups (interactional justice). We explore the implications of our findings and propose how incumbents and startups can collaborate better in future alliances.

Kristoffer Fossum, Egil Øvrelid, and Alexander Moltubakk Kempton, all from DIGENT, presented research at the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2019) in Stockholm, Sweden. The papers covered the tracks Digital Transformation in the Public Sector, Health Information Technology and IS for Healthcare, and Research Methods and Philosophy.

The paper “From Recombination to Reconfiguration: Affording Process Innovation in Digital Infrastructures” has been written by Øvrelid and Kempton. By questioning how can a digital infrastructure afford process innovation, the study brings an in-depth case study at a Norwegian hospital that has gone through a large-scale digitalization and innovation project.

The paper “Adaptive Networked Governance of E-health Standards: The Case of a Regional Health Information Infrastructure in Norway” was also presented, written by Fossum, Fossum, Hanseth, and Sanner. The paper investigates the governance of e-health standards in one health region in Norway and provides a standards governance model.

The other paper presented at the ECIS 2019 by a DIGENT member was “The Digital is Different: A Realist Reinterpretation of Sociomateriality”. Written by Kempton, it builds on a critical realist position centered on the concept of emergence to discuss the implications of strong sociomateriality.

Professors Bendik Bygstad and Margunn Aanestad also participated at the ECIS 2019, as a member of the Research in progress chairs, and as a faculty in the doctoral consortium, respectively.

PhD student Alice Frantz Schneider from DIGENT participated at the 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S 2019). The event was held in Lappeenranta (Finland) in June and had as the main theme the Finnish concept “Sisu”.
By bringing together researchers, government and industry representatives, the conference focused on the transformational power of ICT to move towards sustainability.
Alice was awarded the “Best Paper runner-up” award at ICT4S 2019 for the paper “Informal Processing of Electronic Waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective”. The study has focused on the workers in Agbogbloshie to investigate the dismantling process of electronic waste, as well as the environmental and social hazards associated.

The conference proceedings are fully open access and include the following themes: challenges in cities and regions, mobilizing new ideas, and involving business.

Matthew Good from DIGENT will be defending his dissertation for the degree of PhD on June 24, 2019.
Good will hold a trial lecture within the topic “System level theories of innovation: From Clusters and Innovation Systems to Entrepreneurial Ecosystems”. The trial lecture starts at 10h15, at Kristen Nygaards sal – 5370, Ole-Johan Dahls hus, Gaustadalléen 23B.

The defense is at 13h15 in the same place. His thesis, entitled “Technology Transfer Support at Universities: An Ecosystem Design Approach”, has been supervised by Professor Mirjam Knockaert (University of Gent) and by Associate Professor Birthe Soppe (University of Oslo).

A couple of weeks ago, PhD student Ivar Hukkelberg from DIGENT, participated at the XP 2019 conference on agile software development in Montreal, Canada. The conference focused on bringing together researchers, practitioners, coaches, and thought leaders to present and discuss their most recent research results and findings. This year, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) started to make itself present as a topic of interest at the agile conference, and there were some interesting cases that discussed AI’s role in the agile software development field.

During the conference, Ivar presented the workshop paper “Exploring the challenges of integrating data science roles in agile autonomous teams”. The paper was written together with Marthe Berntzen, who is doing a PhD in coordination in large scale agile projects. Through interviews with data scientists, Ivar and Marthe used the data collected to describe different challenges when trying to integrate the data scientist role into autonomous teams. The presentation was well received, and it was pointed out that the topic was of high relevance these days.

 

Sumit Pandey from DIGENT will be defending his dissertation for the degree of PhD on June 7, 2019.
Pandey will hold a trial lecture within the topic “A post-phenomenological view on how smart technologies mediate human relations”. The trial lecture will be at 10h15, at Lille Auditorium, Kristen Nygårds hus, Gaustadalléen 23A.

The defense will be at 12h15 in the same place. His thesis – entitled “Designing Smart Things” – has combined critical and speculative design with strategic design. Professor Alma Leora Culén has been the main supervisor, and Dr. Ole Christian Smørdal and Associate Professor Maja Van Der Velden the co-supervisors.

All welcome!

Professor Beate Sjåfjell from the Department of Private Law and Associate Professor Maja Van Der Velden from DIGENT are the guest editors for a special issue for the open-access Journal Sustainability.

The special issue is connected to the conference “Corporate Sustainability Reforms: Securing Market Actors’ Contribution to Global Sustainability” that will happen in Oslo on 24 October 2019. The conference aims to discuss ways of facilitating the transition towards sustainability and to identify concrete proposals. It will be open to all interested, including scholars, students, policy-makers and practitioners.

The deadline for sending abstracts (max 500 words) is 20 June 2019. Subject to peer-review, selected abstracts will be invited to submit papers to the special issue, with the deadline on 25 September 2019.