Industrial IT group

The capacity to innovate and commercialize new high-technology products is increasingly a part of the international competition for economic leadership. To this end, governments around the world are taking active steps to strengthen their national innovation systems. These steps underscore the belief that rising costs and risks associated with new technologies require national R&D programs to support new and existing high-technology firms within their borders.

In our projects we understand innovation as the transformation of an idea into a marketable product or service, a new or improved manufacturing or distribution process, or a new method of providing a service. This transformation involves an adaptive network of institutions that encompass a variety of informal and formal rules and procedures—a national innovation ecology—that shape how individuals and firms create knowledge and collaborate to bring new products and services to market.

Recognizing this, policymakers around the world are supporting a variety of initiatives to reinforce their national innovation ecology as a way of improving their national competitiveness. VINNOVA is the leading policymaker on innovation in Sweden, seeking to push the policies surrounding innovation in Sweden and thus improving the preconditions for the national innovation system. How do they want our national innovation ecology to improve then? In a recent debate article in Dagens Industri Mari-Ann Krantz and Per Eriksson argue for a return to the Swedish leadership model – emphasizing a democratic touch on decision-making and collaborative efforts in general as an organizing idea – as key in boosting our national innovation ecology. In particular they suggest that (1) investments in technological research is to be complemented with development of our knowledge of how to create the preconditions for productivity and innovation, and (2) these issues must be under critical scrutiny in the form of shape of a debate involving firms as well as union representatives.

I totally agree. In fact, I have argued in a previous post how the open innovation model should be the vision for the Swedish R&D landscape. In the day and age of ‘democratic innovation’ (as von Hippel puts it) or open/distributed innovation processes (as Chesbrough puts it) we should build on Swedish leadership models, rather than importing international trends, in seeking the preconditions for innovation. In our research we are grounding our innovation models in experiences from our regional innovation system and looking at our promising results I dare to say we are beginning to cover the first issue raised by Krantz and Eriksson: we are building knowledge of how to create the preconditions for productivity and innovation.

Filed under: Projects, Innovation, Science and knowledge production, Innovation ecology on June 15th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

I was just reading a new report issued by HSV outlining ideas for how to strengthen the relation between research quality and the allocation of resources. I like the report in many ways, and even though I feel one should be very mindful in changing the resource allocation system overnight I feel very strongly about making research quality matter more. We do have a relatively good system for measuring quality in academia – there are few arguments against the peer-review system – and I strongly believe good research will be published and cited sooner or later. To this end, it is hardly a controversial idea to increase the funding for high-quality research. Bibliographic research is a complex undertaking and the report contains some interesting discussions on what the implications of different models may be. Be this as it may, it seems as if the report has gained some support, for instance from Bremer and Söderholm.

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Filed under: Applied IT, Job market, The informatics discipline, Science and knowledge production, IT students on June 7th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

This year’s IRIS conference will be held in Åre. It will be the 31th conference, an impressive number by any standard.

We try to take part of the IRIS community as often as possible, this time around we will present four papers:

Levén & Holmström: Consumer co-creation and the ecology of innovation: A living lab approach

Augustsson & Holmström: Two Sides of a Coin: An Action Research Study on IT Infrastructure Design and Organizational Knowledge Management

Sandberg & Holmström: From Drift to Control: Examining Modular Architechture and Standardization of Organizational Processes Through ERP Systems

Rönnbäck & Holmström: Attention Shaping in Risk Assessment Processes: An Action Research Study

These papers are snapshots from some of our current projects and we hope to get some good feedback on our papers at the conference.

Filed under: Publications, Presentations/Seminars on June 6th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

It is announced today in a press release that Kalle Lyytinen is to be installed as an honorary doctor at Umeå University this fall. Congratulations to Kalle, a well deserved honor!

Filed under: Current events on June 2nd, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

To fulfill its promise, democracy must meet challenges of equity, inclusion and accountability. This requires an organized citizenry with the power to articulate and assert its interests effectively. Unfortunately, this has been an ideal more than a reality over the years. But maybe the Internet is levelling the playing field? Among the many promises of the digital revolution is its potential to strengthen democracy and make governments more responsive to the needs of their citizens. E-government is a research field trying to address this challenge, albeit in ways that I have never been overly impressed with. I do believe there is an important grassroots movement affecting the future of democracy but this has not really been caught on the e-gov radar. We have a promising paper in progress (Klang, Lindgren and myself) that is focusing on the ways in which democracy is enacted in practice, but too few studies are looking closer into these grassroots movements. Grassroots movements, more than e-voting , are keys for enacting democracy in the day and age of Internet.

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Filed under: Current events, Democracy, E-government on May 25th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Our ISJ paper is published now, in the May issue. In the editorial it is noted:

The value chain model is focused on the internal activities of the firm, while the value constellation model is focused on empowering customers to create value for themselves. The discussion provides valuable insights for this company as well as showing how the ubiquitous information environment can have an impact that stretches beyond single organizations. The topic is new, interesting and important, and the empirical study data provided in this paper is especially valuable.

The full reference to the paper is: Jonsson, K., Westergren, U H., and Holmström, J (2008). Technologies for value creation: an exploration of remote diagnostics systems in the manufacturing industry, vol 18, pp. 227–245

Filed under: Publications, Sensor technologies, Innovation, Value creation, Interpretative case study, Services on April 8th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Innovation in baseball has unfortunately been all about enhancing the muscle power among power hitters by means of various types of drugs. Hopefully this problem is under control now. So now MLB are looking at e-services as the arena for innovation. I am just looking at getting tickets for the Braves games. Season starts any day now and for some strange reason I’ll be there just in time for opening day It seems like buying tickets is getting more and more convenient via transactions over the Internet and printed on the customer’s laser or inkjet printer. Printable tickets are hotter than Roger Clemens in baseball these days!

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Filed under: Innovation, Baseball, Services on March 17th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Sweden’s governmental system has a tradition of trying to have efficient interplay with industry policy and university research. VINNOVA plays an important part in achieving such an interplay with its mission to promote sustainable growth by financing needs-driven R&D and by developing innovation systems at all levels. Its focus is to strengthen cooperation between academia, companies, and the public sector.

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Filed under: Innovation, Science and knowledge production, Value creation on March 13th, 2008 by Jonny | 1 Comment »

We had the pleasure to have Kalle Lyytinen visiting us Monday and Tuesday. We had some very stimulating discussions, and Kalle’s sharp intellect helps us to push our projects further.

It is very important for us to push our ambitions further and seek collaborations with the very best researchers. Kalle is without a doubt in that league. In fact, looking at the question he eloquently raised in EJIS recently – why the old world cannot publish? – one could argue that the answer to the question is that our very best researchers tend to leave Europe to work in the US. Kalle is one of them, but it is certainly a rewarding thing to align him to the ProcessIT innovation network so we can have him working with us “in the old world” on a project basis.

With Kalle’s competence and experience as an addition to ProcessIT:s innovation system we might actually be able to raise our ambitions significantly. In particular, Kalle’s earlier work on disruptive IT innovation as an architectural innovation originating in the information technology base has strong relations to what we are doing in our current projects. Such base innovations establish necessary but not sufficient conditions for innovation, and to push things further on that topic, Kalle gave a talk on Tuesday where he sketched on a taxonomy on types of innovation networks – with a focus on the degree of heterogeneity in the underlying knowledge resources mobilized in the innovation process, and the degree of centralized control in the process. Very thought-provoking and stimulating! It seems as if extreme innovation is the next thing (see Lyytinen and Rose’s track at ICIS) and our ProcessIT experiences are certainly extreme in many interesting ways. I hope to be able to collaborate with Kalle on this topic in the future, in particular in relation to our ABB/LKAB collaboration as ABB seeks to provide IT infrastructures for integrated solutions or services to LKAB in a sort of semi-closed open innovation process. Kalle will be coming here on a regular basis since he agreed on serving on ProcessIT’s international advisory board, so we will have plenty of chances. Welcome onboard Kalle!

Filed under: ProcessIT, Presentations/Seminars, IT infrastructure, Innovation on March 12th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

We just got a book chapter published in the book Innovative Technologies for Information Resources Management. The full reference:

Boudreau, M.-C. and J. Holmström, “Understanding Information Technology Implementation Failure: An Interpretative Case Study of Information Technology Adoption in a Loosely Coupled Organization,” in Innovative Technologies for Information Resources Management,  M. Khosrow-Pour, Information Science Reference, Chapter VIII, 2007.

Filed under: Publications, Interpretative case study on March 5th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Lars & Jonny got their paper “Running to stand still - examining the role of information technology in industrial risk management” accepted for the 16th European Conference on Information Systems to be held in Galway, Ireland. The paper is a result of our ProcessIT project on risk management.

Nice to see how the Irish appreciated how we stole our title from a U2 song:

When in Rome, do as the Romans do; when in Ireland, do as U2 does

Filed under: Risk management, Publications, ProcessIT on March 4th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Kalle Lyytinen will be visiting us to work on a paper and to discuss our open innovation project. He will give a presentation too, on March 11, 13-15, in MC413. The abstract and Kalle’s bio:

Kalle Lyytinen is Iris S. Wolstein professor Case Western Reserve University, USA, adjunct professor at University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and visiting professor at University of Loughborough U.K. He serves currently on the editorial boards of several leading information systems and requirements engineering journals including/ Journal of AIS (/Editor-in-Chief/), Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information&Organization, Requirements Engineering Journal, Information Systems Journal, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, and Information Technology and People,/ among others. He is AIS fellow (2004), and the former chairperson of IFIP 8.2 and a founding member of SIGSAND and AIS./ /He also led the research team that developed and implemented MetaEdit+ which is the leading domain modeling and metaCASE platform globally. He has published over 180 scientific articles and conference papers and edited or written eleven books on topics related to nature of IS discipline, system design, method engineering, organizational implementation, risk assessment, computer supported cooperative work, standardization, and ubiquitous computing. He is currently involved in research projects that look at the IT-induced radical innovation in software development, IT-induced innovation in architecture, engineering and construction industry, requirements discovery and modeling for large scale systems, and the adoption of broadband wireless services in the U.K.,China and the U.S.

Filed under: Presentations/Seminars, Innovation on March 2nd, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

I must say our students at the digital media production program keep producing really cool productions. Last year they produced the DMP Cribs and usual systemvetare clips. This year Lars Rönnbäck gave them as assignments to give shape to our research profile at Umeå university - Applied IT. One of the groups went for what a world without IT could be like, opting for comedy much like the clips from last year (the usual systemvetare and DMP Cribs). My personal favorite is providing us with a reflection over how our ‘ones and zeros’ takes off at campus and are diffused throughout society. Very impressive:

Filed under: Applied IT, IT students on February 23rd, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

The 8th Social Study of ICT workshop (SSIT8) will be held at LSE on April 25.  The theme is The Habitat of Information: Social and Organizational Consequences of Information Growth. In the description of the workshop it is stated:

There is a growing awareness of the current information growth dynamics and the emerging information habitat. However, the recent character of the phenomenon makes the social and economic implications of these dynamics not well understood. The 8th Social Study of ICT workshop brings together a number of prominent scholars and practitioners whose work and experience help illuminate the relevant developments.

Looking at the program we can see an impressive list of names including Borgmann, Kallinikos, Hanseth and Bowker. Should be very interesting, hopefully someone from our group will be able to attend.

Filed under: Philosophy, Presentations/Seminars, The informatics discipline, Techno-science, Science and knowledge production on February 16th, 2008 by Jonny | No Comments »

Bruno Latour recently visited LSE to participate in a session with the ambition to re-adapt or re-structure actor-network theory in order to better appreciate today’s pervasive empirical challenges. We run the risk, Latour says in one of his remarks, of missing the methaphysics produced by new entities, perhaps most recently the whole methaphysics related to digital artifacts and the notion of re-production. What is the original and the copy in the context of digital artifacts? How does this new notion of ‘the digital’ change our perception of production and re-production? Listen to the seminar here.

On a sidenote it is interesting to see how Latour himself keeps moving, reinvents himself, and tries to avoid becoming this stale old center-piece in the actor-network garden. He has made efforts at this in the past, perhaps most notably in his well-known effort to recall actor-network theory pretty much like a car manufacturer recalls a malfunctioning car. But, in the spirit of “following the actors” it seems as if his followers consider him the actor to follow, and thus Latour remains the key figure in actor-network theory despite all his efforts to recall the theory or to run away from it all. The questions towards the end of the seminar from the PhD students suggest they are still considering him to be the cornerstone of the social study of technology. I can hear Latour lamenting: “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in”

Filed under: Theory, Presentations/Seminars, Techno-science, Science and knowledge production on February 14th, 2008 by Jonny | 1 Comment »