Start of the second funding period
published on Tuesday, February 5th 2013

It is with great pleasure that we inform you that the funding of the networked service society project has been extended with a second funding period by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), until the end of 2014. It will be conducted for two more years, with a total funding of 199,874.40 Euro. In the second funding period we will conduct further joint activities in order to establish a global service research centre. Thereby, we will focus on three main areas: joint research, joint education and joint industry projects.

Joint Research

During the first funding period, we performed joint resaerch which was published in some of the leading Information Systems conferences. In the area of a networked service society, we aim at further connecting research activities in the ERCIS network with research streams at our partner institutions around the world. In our joint research, we will focus on the two research fields of "Global Service Business Process Management" and "Business Value of Social Networks". In these areas, we will conduct joint research with our partners in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. Our goal is to perform research that matters to the public and that we can publish in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and on international conferencs. In order to further extend our service research center, we will also attempt to embed these initiatives into the broader context of the global ERCIS network, in particular involving research institutions in the emerging BRICS states.

Joint Education

We attempt to broaded existing concepts of joint education in the ERCIS network. In the first funding period, student exchange programs have been designed and extended in order to increase student mobility between the involved partners. In addition, the project enabled us to conduct a serien of resaerch visits to some of the involved institutions in order to establish some first insights into a joint PhD education program. One way to extend the existing structures in the second funding period is to conduct an international summer school for phd students that we be a unique learning experience for PhD students in the area of the networked service society. Building on these efforts, a long-term goal is to facilitate a collaborative phd program with our partner institutions, that allows for an improved mobility of PhD students and enables them to research research phenomena in an international context. On a long term, this collaboration phd education might be extended to include additional partners in the ERCIS network, particularly including the BRICS states.

Joint Industry Projects

In addition to broadening the cooperation of the involved research partners, we plan to actively involve industry partners from different countries into the collaboration. A first step is to perform joint industry projects with commercial partners in Australia. Later on, joint industry projects might also be conducted in other countries.

What’s next?

The project will be continued with a joint research effort at the QUT in Brisbane, starting with a research visit to be conducted by Andrea Malsbender from February until the end of April 2013.