Lars Mathiassen, Ph.D.
Business Process Innovation
Georgia State University
Recruited: 2002
Dr. Mathiassen studies innovation of business services and processes enabled by information technology. His primary focus is on organizing and managing complex transformation and change processes in which information technology plays a key role.
How do you identify business problems and match them with technological opportunities? How do you share information across organizational boundaries?
How do you design and implement new services, processes and networks that attract customers and empower people to perform well and develop new skills as they go along?
How do you set up and manage innovation projects in dynamic environments? How do you identify and address the risks involved in such projects?
His studies are based on the assumptions that skilled people and collaboration across boundaries play a key role in successful projects, that a combination of analytical and experimental approaches are needed to reach satisfactory results, and that learning and improvement needs to be integrated into each new innovation project. The most common reason for organizations to fail when implementing new business services and processes is NOT lack of knowledge. Rather it is their inability to build on and learn from what they already know.
Research
Dr. Mathiassen's search is organized in close collaboration with other professors and PhD students in the Center for Process Innovation at Georgia State University. One of its key goals is to contribute to continued development and growth in Georgia by facilitating intensive exchanges between business and academia in the area of business innovation and information technology.
Such exchanges will contribute both to the goals of businesses and at the same time provide Georgia's research environment with important stimuli and opportunities. In particular, he will continue to develop the exchanges between researchers at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University and the business community in Atlanta and Georgia.
Networking is a hot issue related to business innovation and information technology. Modern information technology makes it possible to transcend organizational boundaries and thereby create new business opportunities and collaboration patterns. Understanding precisely how these opportunities can be realized in a specific business setting is, however, not easy. Networking with specific businesses to understand their networking traditions and opportunities is a key activity in his research.
At the same time researchers need to network between different areas of business knowledge, e.g. information systems, strategy, management, finance, and marketing, to be able to effectively address the problems that today’s businesses face when innovating services and processes enabled by information technology.
Choosing Georgia
The Atlanta area has become one of the world’s leaders in business innovation and information technology both on the business side and on the academic side. This particular area of the world therefore offers fantastic opportunities for a researcher who studies innovation practices enabled by information technology.
