To kick off the format, the topic is “Agile, interdisciplinary research on digital transformation: Can the facilitator save us?”
Through today’s technology everything has a digital dimension. And everything is connected. Effectively researching the resulting networks of effects won’t work within the narrow boundaries of individual disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is the solution. But it’s not an easy fix, as it, too comes with several challenges for research practice.
Through a study with researchers of digital transformation research we identified the following main challenges (Schmitt, Goldmann, Simon & Bieber, in press):
a) achieving a common understanding of interdisciplinarity in a diverse group of researchers,
b) finding a mutual understanding of foreign disciplinary concepts, methods and perspectives,
c) overcoming hierarchies, and
d) guiding and structuring the research process in an interdisciplinary team.
As supported through the study, interdisciplinary collaboration could benefit from focused support. The interviewed researchers call for an external entity to support and foster mutual understanding within interdisciplinary research teams. This added ‘facilitator’ – a concept borrowed from the field of business innovation – carries the hope of bridging the communicative and processual gaps between fragmented disciplinary approaches, and hierarchies. But will this hope be fulfilled? Will the facilitator be the one to successfully structure and guide processes of co-creation in yet uncharted environments?
With NN, expert on process facilitation and transformation, Samuel Simon will discuss how might we include external roles such as the facilitator in research on digital transformation? Is this role able to address the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration? Is the facilitator able to save us? And why is it misleading to put those questions like that?
Maximilian Brenker will moderate the event.