The Information Systems field has traditionally focused most of the research effort on understanding technology within a single organizational context — from a monocentric vantage point of a single organization. However, the widespread diffusion of Internet-enabled technologies in the early 1990s has since seen an explosion in technologies enabling interconnectivity in polycentric arrangements. The past decades have, as a result, seen an Information Systems research response towards expanding the research agenda to studying inter-organizational systems, digital platforms, technology-enabled ecosystems, and digital infrastructures.
This talk seeks to frame more than three decades’ of research into the organizational adoption of technologies that all support various aspects of polycentric interconnectivity. The talk will outline the experiences from contributing to research on computer-mediated collaboration, mobile technologies in enterprises, digital platform innovation, and the proliferation of digital infrastructures to both reflect on this research journey so far, but in particular, also to set out a future agenda for the study of polycentric enterprise technologies. This will, in particular, focus on the critically under-researched role of the platform-infrastructure relationship in disruptive innovation, and the need for Information Systems to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the enterprise role of polycentric technologies.
14:00-14:05 Welcome by acting Head of Department, Helle Zinner Henriksen
14:05-14:15 Welcome by Dean of Research, Søren Hvidkjær
14:15-14:45 Inaugural lecture by Carsten Sørensen
14:45-15:30 Reception – Howitzvej 60, 4th floor
Carsten Sørensen is DIREC Professor in Digital Transformation within Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School. He has been affiliated with a number of Danish, Swedish and British institutions, and worked for a large part of his career at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He has extensive EU research project experience from 1992 and international project experience from 1990. His research is published widely within Information Systems. He has since the late 80s been actively engaged as consultant and executive educator with a range of organisations.