Creation, Transfer, and Diffusion of Innovation in Organizations and Society: Information Systems Design Science Research for Human Benefit

Design science research is a way of creating and studying new technological phenomena, where the understanding comes from inventing, designing, and building new forms of solutions to problems. It has been touted as a new means for the IS field to improve its relevance as the resulting design artifact(s) can directly be used to solve relevant problems. DSR is different from other types of research in its focus on building artifacts and learning from the use and application of the artifacts. It is different in that it engages reality in a way that no descriptive or observational research method can. DSR shares the iterative process with action research but can take place in a laboratory without any involvement of users as researchers (Iivari and Venable 2009). 2 Introduction Herbert Simon (1996) defined the science of design as the study of the artificial and properly " the way in which that adaptation of means to environments is brought about " (p. 113). Melding science with design provides a means for designing at higher levels of abstraction, designs that are more universal and address a general class of problems rather than a single, unique design problem. In their seminal papers on DSR, Nunamaker et al. (1991), Walls et al. (1992), and March and Smith (1995) laid the foundation for DSR. The consolidation of DSR into mainstream Information Systems research came with Hevner et al.'s (2004) article in MIS Quarterly. In information systems, Vaishnavi and Kuechler (2004) define design science research as " the analysis of the use and performance of designed artifacts to understand, explain and very frequently to improve on the behavior of aspects of Information Systems. " Central to these notions is the design of an artifact that is meant to have a presence in the real world. This artifact could be conceived as a construct, a model, a method, or a material instantiation (March and Smith 1995). The present conference expands on DSR research approaches in IS in three key areas. First, the conference assumes that designing and developing a new technology without also considering the transfer, diffusion, and adoption of that new technology risks producing research that is irrelevant. Both design practice and DSR projects are conducted within an organizational and societal environment, but DSR outcomes (arti-facts) must be diffused and adopted into a broad variety of organizational and societal settings. While the importance of such issues has …