Vision & Projects

Vision

Our view is that information and knowledge exchanges have been essential for human productivity and well being since mankind, but that the opportunities of IT as a new medium for these exchanges will fundamentally change this. The problem with any new technology though is that it can be used both successfully and unsuccessfully, but that currently, in contrast to most information systems, we do not have a comprehensive theory for information services development and management. Typical practice problems we want to study and provide solutions for are the often content owner orientation of information supply, which results in low values for the potential content user, difficulties of specifying an information good, business models for information services that result in quick collapse or diminishing value of the service after its initial creation, and information services that are pushed from information technological invention instead of organizational business needs.

We approach informing and information exchanges from a social network perspective, implying that we regard information and knowledge as more or less distributed in a group of people and organizations. Information services are conceived here as intermediating actors that facilitate matching people’s knowledge and resources and support the actual transfer and utilization of knowledge from diverse others.

Projects

·	Informing as business: This projects studies opportunities of companies of selling information as addition or as substitute for traditional brick and mortar business activities.

·	Knowledge exchange games: Here we study game theoretical approaches to the analysis of knowledge exchange dilemmas.

·	Information services design: This project wants to empirically study how information services have been developed on the Internet or intra organizationally, what can be learned from this, and how this can be incorporated in a design theory for information services.

·	Information services management and exploitation: This project focuses on the life cycle management of information services.

Current research is done in interaction with the VRL-KCIP (www.vrl-kcip.org), where the focus is on information and knowledge sharing with regard to manufacturing knowledge for high tech, mainly SME, companies.

Other research is done in collaboration with information brokers on the Internet and with networks of expertise in large firms.

Parts of the research is performed in collaboration with the capacity groups of NIKOS, Production and Logistic Management, and Finance and Accounting.