The KIN Center for Digital Innovation is part of the School of Business and Economics (SBE) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). We are organization scholars who study the development of digital innovations and the intended and unintended consequences of the use of digital technologies in organizations. We do this by looking beyond the hypes and by actively engaging with organizational professionals who are managing, developing and using these new technologies.
There are few if any, places in the world where you can find state-of-the-art expertise encompassing the wide field of Digital Innovation, ranging from the development of smart technologies in ecosystems, to changing work practices under influence of AI, from crowdsourcing through online platforms to the changing role of the IT organization.
This is what makes the KIN Center for Digital Innovation a unique place in the world.
Embedded research
A hallmark of our way of working is that we do embedded research: we study the development and use of digital technologies within its context over longer periods of time and often through ethnographic methods of research. This allows us to develop a deep understanding of the phenomenon under study, to keep an open mind and include the often unexpected or unintended consequences of digital technologies in our explanations. Clearly, embedded research helps to create a real organizational impact as we learn to speak the language of the people we study and develop an understanding of their worldviews. It is only via such in-depth knowledge that we are able to engage with organizations and help them in their transitions towards the digital.
This research is conducted by a multi-disciplinary group of researchers with academic backgrounds in business administration, sociology, communication science, anthropology, philosophy, engineering, industrial design, and computer science. Meet our team here.