Establishing Research Cooperation with the Asian-Pacific Region

The prosperity of industrial countries is increasingly based on offering highly advanced services. A flexible and efficient networking of companies and public administrations is essential to enter and serve customers globally. By setting up joint research capabilities with our partners in the Asia-Pacific region, the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) contributes to understanding these trends and to driving their future course.

The world-spanning network society has enabled new ways for capitalizing on recent innovations in information technology. The Networked Service Society project is focused on thoroughly analyzing the interplay between service networks and IT. We focus on analyzing and designing two areas of service research. First, we develop new methods and strategies for the global organization of business processes in multinational settings. Second, we theorize on and shape the commercialization of Social Media for networked service enterprises and the public sector.

The primary objective of our multi-national project is to strengthen the long-term research structures of the ERCIS with our partner institutions in the Asian-Pacific region. For this purpose, research visits, workshops, and seminars are being conducted cooperatively. We cooperate in three in decisive areas. In Joint Research, we perform high quality research and publish our results in leading peer-reviewed journals and present them on international conferences. In Joint Industry Projects, we perform research that ‘matters’, in close cooperate with industry partners and the public sector. Our objective is to establish long-term cooperation initiatives funded by these stakeholders. In Joint Education, we develop and implement joint education programs for increasing the mobility of our students and PhD students.

We establish a Service Science Competence Center at the ERCIS – a network of researchers in information systems development and organizational design. In the first funding period, we strengthened our cooperation and established new ties with partners in Korea. In the second funding period, these structures will be institutionalized further. Our long-term goal is to align our initiatives with other activities the ERCIS performs in cooperation with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries.

The NSS project is kindly supported by the International Office of the German Ministry of Education and Research (promotion sign: 01DR12003). More information is available at: http://www.networkedservicesociety.net/.