Towards Health Futures: Innovating with Health Data, a Pre-ICIS Workshop

We invite information systems researchers to our Pre-ICIS workshop “Towards Health Futures” at ICIS 2022 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Together, we seek to explore the role of data in health through the lenses of digital innovation and entrepreneurship. It will take place on Sunday, Dec. 11, from 8:30 to 12:30 at the Bella Center, attached to AC Hotel Bella Sky, Copenhagen. There are only a few seats left. You can sign-up for the workshop with your ICIS registration. If you only plan to join the workshop only (without ICIS conference), follow this link.

New digital technologies such as AI, blockchain, wearable devices, genomics or vertical integration have a substantial impact on health in humans, animals, and plants (Sturman, 2018). Many of these technologies are fundamentally built on data that promise new diagnostics and treatments, personal health tracking, predictive healthcare, decentralized storage or federated learning (e.g., Kallinikos and Tempini 2014; Reddy, 2019). The use and re-use of shared data trigger new value creation mechanisms that change the role of data (Aaltonen et al. 2021; Alaimo and Kallinikos 2021). Organizing data in health, however, is difficult because of regulatory demands and because many of the underlying biological, social, and technological concepts and relationships that are represented by data remain complex and are not yet fully understood.

Data in health, however, is being used and re-used to create opportunities and generate benefits in ways that could not be foreseen when they were created. The facilitation of data storage and the practices of curation and access are crucial for data to serve multiple and possibly unexpected purposes (Tempini, 2017; Vassilakopoulou, Skorve, & Aanestad, 2018).
With few exceptions though, information systems research has focused largely on platforms, infrastructures, or services that collect, store, or analyze data, in ways that assigns a secondary role to the data itself (Jarvenpaa & Markus, 2018). Even a conversation about boundary resources – an artifact that enables this serendipitous purpose – tends to focus on the implemented APIs instead of the data that the APIs exchange (e.g., de Reuver, Sørensen, & Basole, 2017; Eaton, Elaluf-Calderwood, Sorensen, & Yoo, 2015; Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). We seek to extend our understanding about the role of data as a driver of digital innovation (e.g., Barrett, Davidson, Prabhu, & Vargo, 2015; Fichman, Dos Santos, & Zheng, 2014; Yoo, Henfridsson, & Lyytinen, 2010) and digital entrepreneurship (e.g., Davidson & Vaast, 2010; Kelestyn & Henfridsson, 2014; Nambisan, 2016), believing that health provides a societally important context and fruitful empirical foci in the pursuit of meaningful theorizing in this area.

Workshop agenda

1. Introduction

2. Input from Industry

Spotlights on Decentriq – a new venture that provides data clean rooms – and the European COVID-19 Data Portal provided by EMBL-EBI and ELIXIR.

3. Panel

3. Roundtables

Roundtables with 21 author discussions led by workshop chairs and discussants, such as

4. Joint Summary

The Workshop concludes by a joint summary of insights from the panel and roundtables. We strive to build a community of scholars and practitioners interested in pushing Information Systems research Towards Health Futures.

Chairs

Hannes Rothe
Assoc. Professor, ICN Business School (Berlin, Paris, Nancy),  Germany / France

Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa
Professor, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Anna Essen
Assoc. Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden

Aleksi Aaltonen
Professor, Temple University, USA

Panelists

Aleksi Aaltonen (Temple University, USA)

Ali Sunyaev (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Germany)

Elizabeth J. Davidson (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA)

Katharina Lauer (ELIXIR & Covid Data Platform, UK)

Silvia Masiero (University of Oslo, Norway)

Commentators

Cristina Alaimo (Luiss Guido Carli University, Italy)

Margunn Aanestad (University of Agder Norway)

Marta Stelmaszak Rosa (Portland State University)

Lauri Wessel (European University Viadrina Frankurt, Germany)

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