Giving talk at Victoria University, Melbourne
While in Melbourne, I got invited to Victoria University to do a talk for faculty and research students. This is the outline of my talk that I gave:
—- Rigor vs. and relevance of academic research: an example of Knowledge Management Systems design research
Doing research is about arriving to new findings that provide practical and theoretical contributions. Without the latter, piece of research is unpublishable in respectable publishing venues. Without the former, it is difficult to engage real-world organizations in research; this decreases our chances of getting funded and collect data, which in turn endangers our whole research. This chicken-egg dilemma is reflected in academia as rigor vs. relevance debate. The goal of this talk is to share advice of why and how to do both practically and theoretically relevant research. This will be done through an example of such research that was performed in some of the worlds most innovative and knowledge-aware companies, Parsons Brinckerhoff (USA) and Samsung Electronics (Korea). The goal of that research was to create a model and method for design of Knowledge Management Systems. Besides discussing problem area, research methodology, practical and theoretical contributions of that research, I will reflect on the rigor vs. relevance debate and answer how to satisfy both organizational and academic 
audience of our research efforts.
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It was a great opportunity to discuss hot topics with high quality researchers. The campus is excellently located and host professors Prof Dr Stephen Burgess and Prof Dr John Bentley (Head of School), and all the staff I met, extremely welcoming. After the talk, the lively discussion continued at lunch across the river, and opportunities revealed themselves one after another.
Great day Down Under, that is for sure.