Thorsten Schoormann

Technische Universität Braunschweig · Information Systems - Data-Driven Enterprise

The development of business models that boost fundamental changes in behavior to act more economically, ecologically, and socially is a challenging task because the consideration of sustainability is a multidimensional problem characterized by uncertainty and value conflicts. In order to deal with such complex tasks, methodological and technical to...

Taxonomies are classification systems that help researchers conceptualize phenomena based on their dimensions and characteristics. To address the problem of 'ad-hoc' taxonomy building, Nickerson et al. (2013) proposed a rigorous taxonomy development method for information systems researchers. Eight years on, however, the status quo of taxonomy rese...

The booming adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) likewise poses benefits and challenges. In this paper, we particularly focus on the bright side of AI and its promising potential to face our society’s grand challenges. Given this potential, different studies have already conducted valuable work by conceptualizing specific facets of AI and susta...

Teams working on creative projects, such as design thinking, mostly face complex problems as well as challenging situations characterized by uniqueness and value conflicts. To cope with these characteristics, teams usually start doing something by drawing on their current store of experiences and professional knowledge, and then (re-)assess the out...

Today's Information Systems (IS) design research projects pursue digital innovation to conquer complex societal challenges. Many of these projects reach out beyond disciplinary and organisational boundaries, as evident in interdisciplinary consortia and academia‐industry collaboration. The design activities in each project differ based on contextua...

Data ecosystems offer a promising avenue to conceptualize the value of data for individual organizations and large networks. The 3 rd edition of the mini-track "Designing Data Ecosystems: Values, Impacts, and Fundamentals" invited papers on exploring a broad range of data ecosystem nuances. This includes papers on the conceptual understanding, tech...

Novel technologies are getting growing attention in our scholarly lives and are shifting the way traditional research practices are used. This paper explores how design research is affected by technological advancements and what potential risks can arise from that. By surveying information systems (IS) design literature, we observed a focus on enha...

Technical coordination between organizations and security concerns are among the major barriers to data sharing. Data spaces are an emerging digital infrastructure that helps address these challenges by sovereignly sharing data across institutional boundaries. The data space concept is at the core of many high-profile research initiatives in the Eu...

While agile management approaches have become ubiquitous in responding to increasing uncertainty, agile teams often stock in adaptability due to entrenched ways of thinking and acting. This paper therefore asked how agile teams can be supported in shaping their mindsets and behaviors to embrace change. By following design science research and in...

Business process management (BPM) has the ability to boost transformations towards sustainable entities by innovating organizational structures. While the majority of existing BPM tools and methods focus on economic obligations, social sustainability is often underrepresented. This is problematic because it inhibits business improvement of people’s...

Single organizations encounter intricate challenges in meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on their own and thus are increasingly concerned with forming ecosystems. This is also the case in the e-commerce domain. It is assumed that particularly focal actors of such ecosystems have the power to foster initiatives towards more susta...

Ecosystems have the promising potential to respond to economic but also environmental and social challenges, such as by enabling circular thinking, establishing fair supply chains, responsible collaborations, and ensuring resilience. In this report, we summarize findings from multiple data sources in the context of the NaWerSys workshop series whic...

Attracting potential candidates is vital for employers amidst an increasing shortage of skilled workers. This paper explores how employers can change job seekers' misconceptions about job roles and company culture through digital employer branding. Using a design science research approach, we iteratively develop and evaluate a digital game that aid...

Inter-organizational data sharing holds significant potential for the industrial sector. It can enable process improvements and novel services and products that drive economic growth and sustainability. In this context, data itself becomes a product that can be shared on data marketplaces. However, the success of data marketplaces in the industrial...

Organizations and even entire industries rethink their processes to align them with principles of circularity. Data is a key driver in the transformation toward a circular economy. Digitalization opens up a vast solution space of new design opportunities for this transformation but also leads to possible tensions between those opportunities. We see...

Today’s society is aging and is becoming more care-dependent. Due to the increasing scarcity of professional care workers, we are witnessing the growing importance of non-professional family care. As the demands for caring can be challenging, digital health applications play a crucial role in assisting with caregiving tasks. These apps help family...

Data has become ubiquitous in our modern world, influencing daily routines, decisions, and social interactions. Thus, data sharing holds great potential to improve the everyday life of individuals and society. For example, during the COVID pandemic, apps helped to monitor the spread of the coronavirus. At the same time, users face unique tensions w...

Organizations need to develop specific capabilities for participating in the circular economy, which prevents them from missing out on improved competitiveness and innovation. A circular mindset for products, processes, and business models is particularly relevant for today's complex supply chains that potentially impact global waste and pollution,...

Theory is a pivotal component in Information Systems (IS) research and no less so in Design Science Research (DSR) projects, which are typically expected to select and use kernel theories to develop theoretical contributions. However, the actual application and utilization of kernel theories remain challenging and heterogeneous – from producing the...

Unlearning outdated knowledge is crucial for organizations to adapt to environmental needs and foster innovation. While unlearning is an auspicious approach, little is known about how to design supporting tools. This paper explores how organizations can effectively implement unlearning interventions and presents an overview of design options for u...

Aging populations are straining many healthcare systems worldwide. The demographic shift leads to higher morbidity and consequently higher care dependency. To respond to a growing shortage of healthcare professionals, non-professional care that is often carried out by family and friends serves as a solution. While digital healthcare applications fo...

Economic, political, and societal pressure forces companies to act more sustainably. New legislation and regulation such as the Supply Chain Act, mandates companies to take responsibility for their actions as well as those of their supply chain collaborators. Meeting these requirements demands transparency. Digital technologies along the supply cha...

In times of rapid and unpredictable developments, companies experience significant volatility in capacity utilization. Virtual capacity exchange platforms help to mitigate this challenge by exchanging capacities with anonymous participants in market-like peer-to-peer networks. However, its efficiency is hindered by behavioral uncertainties, includi...

Nowadays, it is crucial to teach business model ideation skills in education beyond disciplinary boundaries to shape students' abilities to innovate processes, products, and entire businesses. Emerging (software-based) tooling for new ideas and innovations, however, often neglects the unique characteristics faced for educational purposes. Against t...

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is a prevalent topic in recent research and business, seemingly taking the position of a disruptive technology that has the potential to significantly transform industries ranging from productivity (e.g., ChatGPT-4) to creativity (e.g., DALL-E). While the emerging scientific discussion on GAI covers a variet...

Data spaces are a novel data management approach to collect large-scale heterogeneous data distributed over various data sources in different formats. To access these data spaces, users require so-called connectors to ensure technical compliance (e.g., usage control policies) and ensure that users play by the 'same rules'. While connectors are a cr...

Data ecosystems offer an interesting avenue to conceptualize the value of data for individual organizations and large networks. The 2nd edition of the mini-track "Designing Data Ecosystems: Values, Impacts, and Fundamentals" is built on last year's mini-track and invited papers exploring a broad range of data ecosystem facets. These include papers...

Digital industrial platforms are increasingly implemented as an inter-organizational digital infrastructure to unlock numerous sources of value. Establishing an appropriate pricing strategy is pivotal for platform providers' success. To profit from these value sources, existing research considers value-based pricing as a superior and customer-orien...

Promoting business model ideation skills is imperative in contemporary entrepreneurship education and beyond. Emerging (software-based) tooling for such innovations, however, often neglects the unique characteristics faced for educational purposes. To address this, we designed a novel artifact for teaching business model ideation in digital learnin...

One of our society's most fundamental challenges is promoting sustainable development. Data sharing across organizations is one way to spur innovation and address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through optimizing resource utilization, fostering circular supply chains, and producing accurate information about CO2 emissions. However, organi...

As established routines and other forms of knowledge may prevent organizations to respond to changing situations, they need to learn how to break out of the old way of thinking and acting. While unlearning is among the most promising approaches to do so, there is only a limited understanding of the requirements for the effective design of unlearnin...

Particularly young researchers face challenges in organizing large design science research (DSR) projects and often struggle to capture, communicate, and reflect on important components to produce purposeful outcomes. Making informed decisions at the project start, such as selecting suitable kernel theories and development procedures, is of great r...

Pricing is a significant component in determining digital platforms’ strategic and financial position. Informed decisions concerning how to price digital industrial platforms require an integrated and holistic view that organizes heterogeneous pricing options. Given the complexity of pricing, we build a taxonomy based on a systematic literature rev...

Data spaces receive considerable attention nowadays and are at the heart of numerous large-scale European research initiatives shaping the data economy. Their goal is to establish secure environments that enable cross-organizational data management and thereby collect, integrate, and make available heterogeneous data from various sources. Although...

Organizations are increasingly concerned with the continuous reassessment and redesign of their products, processes, and business models to remain competitive in uncertain environments. Thereby, mental models, routines, and behaviors of individuals and entire organizations need to be updated to fit changing demands and environmental factors. 'Unlea...

The modern world is confronted with grand challenges, such as those codified by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. As single organizations are often not capable of addressing a broad set of goals on their own, they are increasingly concerned with creating ecosystems. This is also the case in the domain of e-commerce. Owners of focal...

Zusammenfassung Die schnelllebige Entwicklung und Anwendung neuer digitaler Technologien führt zu einem erhöhten Innovationsdruck. Organisationen müssen sich an stetig verändernde Marktbedingungen anpassen und neue Ideen entwickeln, um Prozesse, Produkte und Geschäftsmodelle kontinuierlich zu erneuern. Für die Umsetzung solcher Ideen ist die Integr...

To sustain competitive advantage in dynamic business environments, organizations have to constantly adapt, innovate, and recombine their business models. As some configurations of business model design options are more successful than others, it is crucial to have a holistic understanding of the (current) solution space of those options and their d...

Although our digitalized society is able to foster social inclusion and integration, there are still numerous communities having unequal opportunities. This is also the case with deaf people. About 750,000 deaf people only in the European Union and over 4 million people in the United States face daily challenges in terms of communication and partic...

Fulfilment is a key driver for the digitalisation of the grocery sector and thus a major source of value creation. Although value creation is contingent on a multiplicity of contextual factors, extant research has mainly explored fulfilment in the generic realms of e-commerce and does not provide empirically grounded insights into the collective in...

Data ecosystems are a novel approach to enabledata sharing on an organizational and personal level. The track ‘Designing Data Ecosystems: Values, Impacts, and Fundamentals’ invited papers on various issues exploring the phenomenon of data ecosystems from multiple angles. Themes included the fundamentals of data sharing, incentives, and barriers to...

Abstracting and formalizing knowledge collected throughout a design science research (DSR) project is important to inform the design of future artifacts. Design principles are one of the prevailing forms to capture design-relevant knowledge and guide both research and practice to build new artifacts. Although today's DSR projects are often agile an...

One of Design Science Research's (DSR) principal purposes is to generate and codify design knowledge. Codification in DSR is done by providing clear chunks of prescriptive knowledge that guide the design of future solutions, including instructions on how to design (parts of) artifacts. Although various codification mechanisms have emerged over the...

Theory is an essential part of design research and helps us to explain what we see or guide what we design. In the paper, we shed light on how kernel theories are used in developing design principles in Design Science Research (DSR). We do this by reporting on a systematic literature review, from which we have extracted a set of six mechanisms to o...

Design principles capture prescriptive design knowledge to guide design science researchers and design professionals in their design works. In the context of a transdisciplinary team, design principles can also be a powerful vehicle to bridge knowledge barriers and facilitate collaboration among team members with different backgrounds and expertise...

The development of design principles is an important ingredient in design science research. Design principles capture and formalize lessons learned from a situational design endeavour to guide both academics and practitioners alike in build-ing similar artefacts. Although the development procedure is highly iterative and creative, it requires a cer...

Taxonomies are artifacts that can be used for numerous purposes, including gap spotting, decision-making, and theory building. Despite the variety of usage purposes, we can observe that designers state that their taxonomies help to ‘classify something’; leaving the full potential of taxonomies rather untapped. In order to lay attention on questions...

Formulating design principles is the primary mechanism to codify design knowledge which elevates its meaning to a general level and applicability. Although we can observe a great variety of abstraction levels in available design principles, spanning from more situated to more generic levels, there is only limited knowledge about the corresponding (...

Classification is an essential approach in business model research. Empirical classifications, termed taxonomies, are widespread in and beyond Information Systems (IS) and enjoy high popularity as both stand-alone artifacts and the foundation for further application. In this article, we focus on the study of empirical business model taxonomies for...

Understanding the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is crucial to contribute to sustainable development including the most fundamental challenges of our society, such as climate change, healthy lives, and inclusive economic growth. As Information Systems (IS) research has a great tradition of investigating how technology and methods can be emplo...

Mobility is an essential need that requires novel opportunities enabling us to travel more sustainably. In attempting to address this, our university—the University Hildesheim—, located within a city of about 100.000 residents seeks to improve especially the student’s and employee’s arrival approaches to, for instance, reduce greenhouse emissions c...

Museums preserve the cultural heritage and aim at providing study and education as well as enjoyment for the general public. In pursuing their missions, museums are increasingly concerned with making these experiences digitally available. Therefore, they start to use online platforms that make cultural objects publicly accessible, and therefore all...

Purpose. This study reports on a master-level university course that teaches sustainability by conveying factual and methodological knowledge in terms of business model development. Design/methodology/approach. We designed the course based on several years of experience and knowledge obtained from previous iterations. For evaluating the course’s u...

Das Erreichen der Nachhaltigkeitsziele der Vereinten Nationen stellt eine der wichtigsten Herausforderungen der heutigen Zeit dar, welche Transformationen in Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft unumgänglich machen. Die Entwicklung innovativer Geschäftsmodelle und deren Umsetzung in sich stetig neu bildenden Wertschöpfungssystemen spielen bei dieser Transfo...

Accumulating prescriptive design knowledge, such as design principles (DP), is one of the fundamental goals in design science research projects. As previous studies have examined the use of DPs in practice to advance the development and communication of such principles, we argue that this attention also needs to be paid to how and for what research...

Researchers and practitioners often face challenges in structuring larger design projects and, therefore, struggle to capture, discuss, and reflect on essential components that should be considered. These first steps are, however, of great importance because decisions such as in terms of selecting an underpinning (kernel) theory, following certai...

Researchers often face challenges already in the early stages of a literature review, and thus, struggle in getting started with the search and in organizing the process. This starting point is however of great relevance because design decisions such as in terms of corpus creation have impacts on the entire results of the review. By following the d...

In face of the complexities of business models as well as their dynamic and uncertain environments, business model designers increasingly rely on a systemic view, for example by applying System Dynamics. Despite acceptance in research and practice, this approach comes however with several drawbacks such as high complexity of model construction and...

Although it is widely accepted to differentiate between economic, ecological, and social dimensions for sustainability, social concerns are often treated with secondary importance. In line with this, also authors from Information Systems (IS) tend, in addition to its economic obligations, to focus on the natural environment and rather neglect the s...

Zusammenfassung Die Kooperation von Wissenschaft und Praxis in anwendungsorientierten Förderprojekten ist zu einem wesentlichen Instrument der Forschung avanciert und intensiviert den Austausch von realen Problemstellungen und innovativen Lösungsansätzen. Themenschwerpunkte, die ein hohes Innovationspotenzial aufweisen, aber noch unscharf diskutier...

Yet despite the great interest in taxonomies, there is virtually no guidance on how to purposefully visualize them. Interestingly, taxonomies are visualized in ways as diverse as morphological boxes, hierarchies and mathematical sets, to name three typical examples. As a result, taxonomy builders face the following question: Which type of taxonomy...

Software tools for business model development hold great promise for supporting business model innovation, but nonetheless, virtually no design-relevant knowledge exists concerning the functions that such tools should possess. As a result, practitioners lack guidance for choosing software tools, and researchers lack a foundation for advancing knowl...

Taxonomies are design science artifacts used by researchers and practitioners to describe and classify existing or future objects of a domain. As such, they constitute a necessary foundation for theory building. Yet despite the great interest in taxonomies, there is virtually no guidance on how to rigorously evaluate them. Based on a literature rev...

In creative work such as design thinking projects, teams mostly seek to solve complex (wicked) problems as well as situations of uncertainty and value conflicts. To design solutions that cope with these aspects, teams usually start doing something, reflect on their results, and adjust their process. By actually doing something, tacit knowledge (i.e...

In an increasingly dynamic environment, organizations need to be able to constantly adapt their business model. When making decisions in terms of adapting a business model, the operative structures that help to implement these adaptations need to be considered as well. Changes in both layers, the business model as well as the business processes, ha...

In order to face fundamental challenges of our society, sustainability has gained of increased interest for business research and practice. One approach that facilitates transforming businesses into more sustainable entities is business process management (BPM). While previous research on sustainable BPM (e.g., Green BPM) seeks to consider ecologic...

Taxonomies constitute one fundamental type of artefact in design science, describing and classifying existing or future objects of a domain. Taxonomies support researchers and practitioners with analysing and understanding a domain, which in turn is a prerequisite for theory building. Despite the increasing interest in taxonomies (and methodologica...

Taxonomies are design science artifacts used by researchers and practitioners to describe and classify existing or future objects of a domain. As such, they constitute a necessary foundation for theory building. Yet despite the great interest in taxonomies, there is virtually no guidance on how to rigorously evaluate them. Based on a literature rev...