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Hosting prof. Desouza in Slovenia

In the forthcoming days I will be hosting prof. dr. Kevin C Desouza of University of Washington, Seattle, in Slovenia. We have a busy schedule in front of us - meeting the executive board of TRIMO as one of the companies where we did research in the innovation area (I4I project), meeting the press (interview for the Manager), discussing future research, consulting opportunities and my doctoral research that he supervises, doing some sightseeing, and also, doing couple of exploratory studies ;)   

On Sunday and Monday we will be attending the Bled Strategic Forum, one of this year’s premier EU gatherings, where the future direction of EU expansion and development, will be discussed. Prof. dr. Desouza has namely been invited to the event as a distinguished panelist at the GLOBAL PREPONDERANCE strategic panel.

Elitist communities… or not… ?

The hole in my wallet after travelling to AOM and the AMCIS got me thinking… I consider myself lucky to be living in quite an advanced economy, and even by sharing my room with other doctoral students (thanx Israr, Olivier, Yukika), getting funded by the I3M and OCIS AOM division, nevertheless this was a costly affair…

Why organizers of such big gatherings don’t try to get better deals for flight tickets or accommodation?  Why are the registration fees so high?  Not many scholars can afford going to these conferences — ECIS, AMCIS, ICIS, AOM, at the end of the day are “a must” if you want to stay connected “in” the community, especially with todays’ pressures to publish, limited tenure positions, etc. Are associations such as AOM and AIS deliberately creating elitist communities?

Of course, the costs for running a conference are high. However, when I think of the 600-pages-printed programme that each of the 9,000+ registered AOM participants received, and which has no value whatsoever after the meeting, i can see some ten or twenty dollars per participant (=100 or even 200,000$ in aggregate) spared. Not to mention the trees. True, the registration fee was only 60 something $. But the hotel room was 200$ a night. I bet AOM could get much better deals for us. Who of the organizers agreed to ridiculous prices of accomodation? Also, with 1,7mio$ net profit for this year, why does AOM not fly over and sponsor promising research from developing countries, in example? I am glad not to be the only one who thinks something is wrong with the current “modus operandi”.

Or when I think of the fireworks at the social event at AMCIS, which was held over the Keystone’ Lake on Saturday evening, I can again see some 10 or 20,000$ wasted… If I compare that to my travel budget, maybe 10 people could be flown there for free… or, registration fees could be lowered by 20 or 30$ for each participant, …

As researchers and knowledge creators in this world, we should know better… 

Maybe it would be nice if huge communities such as AOM or AIS started using their buyer-power to manipulate the places where the conferences are going to be held, and not vice-versa. And review the location-proposals not only to the spectacularity of the setting, but primarily according to the cost per participant… Moreover, why include profits in those yearly reports at AOM or AMCIS? Are these profit organizations?  To me, it would make more sense to aim for increased number of journal papers published, or for decreased costs of travel. Honorable mention obviously goes to Prof Katherine Stewart, who got all the OCIS Doctoral Consortium participants a 500$ travel reimbursement. But not from AOM. She invested her own time to deal with burearocracy of US NSF - National Science Foundation. Job well done! Such things push towards increased knowledge creation.

… Or am I too naive and it is really “elite only club”? 

AMCIS 2007

After the AOM meeting I went straight off to the Thirteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems 2007, which was held from Aug 9-13 in Keystone, Colorado. I presented a paper on “The roles of IT in open and distributed innovation process”, co-authored by the I4I group. It was well received and debated after the presentation, which made the trip worthwile. Besides the nice setting, some presentations, and excellent networking, of course. AMCIS this year was a blast, indeed.

However, the place is all one resort, hence, the cost of living there and getting there were enormous. Big thanks to I3M Institute for Innovation in Information Management (UW, Seattle) which covered the registration fee for me! 

Some photos from Olivier Berthod (one from Martin Yu) below, more photos (by Rachel Chung, Martin Yu and Dennis Galletta) here.

HICSS acceptances sent out… almost… ;)

This year I am acting as a “KM Implementation and other issues” mini-track chair at the 41st HICSS 2008 conference and me and Prof David Croasdell (UNevada, Reno) and the chair Prof Murray Jennex (San Diego StateU) are almost ready to send out the acceptances to the authors. There has been quite a good number of well-done submissions and it was quite a difficult task to pick up the best ones. Congratulations in advance to the ones who made it - and - we are all looking forward to the forthcoming conference. Big Island, here we come :)

Academy of Management 2007 meeting

From Aug 3 to Aug 8 I attended the AOM 2007 meeting in Philadelphia, PA, where I presented my research at the OCIS division doctoral consortium, which was happenning two days before the main conference itself. A big thanks to the organizers, the OCIS division, especially Prof Katherine Stewart, who managed to get funding to reimburse some of the travel costs.

The conference is huge, over 9.000 registered participants were exchanging ideas, making new friends, discussing research and networking. The most difficult was to decide which of the prominent scholars’ presentations (during the day) and which of the receptions (during the evening)  you were to attend. Well, of the latter, INSEAD, NYU, NUS and BAM were excellent. Of the former, pretty much anyone that was accepted for presenting had good stuff to show.

I also received “the most informative post” award for my contributions at the OCIS website - check it out and, if you do information-systems oriented research, welcome to join the OCIS special interest group of Academy of Management, it’s indeed a very very fine one!

Happy happy news :)

The summer holliday in Seychelles was special indeed. Besides the up-scale hospitality of people at places we stayed in and besides the amazing scenery of protected and laid-back islands, July 24 and one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, Anse Source d’Argent, will be two things I will always remember. Me and my Lidija got married there in a simple, beautiful ceremony.

Elements of innovative cultures

An I4I research report has just been published. The paper is titled, “Elements of innovative cultures” and appears in the current issue of Knowledge and Process Management. This paper was an outcome of our I4I research project that examined the best practices of organizations that were successful in building robust innovation programs. 

For a copy of the paper, please visit: Knowledge and Process Management (at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/6242)

Dombrowski, C., Kim, J.Y., Desouza, K.C., Braganza, A., Papagari, S., Baloh, P., and Jha, S. “Elements of Innovative Cultures,” Knowledge and Process Management, 14 (3), 2007, 190-202.

Abstract
Organizational culture is an important determinant of sustained innovativeness and financial performance. Though it is easy to appreciate the important role culture plays in making an innovation successful, it is difficult to change culture. One way of changing culture could be to identify elements of innovative culture and then imbibing the ones relevant to a given organization. In this paper, we have identified, based on past research, eight elements of organizational innovative culture: innovative mission and vision statements, democratic communication, safe spaces, flexibility, collaboration, boundary spanning, incentives, and leadership. We believe that assimilating these elements of organizational culture will enable organizations to support and sustain innovative activities.

Authors
Caroline Dombrowski (The Information School, University of Washington, USA), Jeffrey Y. Kim (The Information School, University of Washington, USA), Kevin C. Desouza (The Information School, University of Washington, USA), Ashley Braganza (Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, UK), Sridhar Papagari (Department of Information and Decision Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), Peter Baloh (Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), Sanjeev Jha (Department of Information and Decision Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)