Innovation projects rely increasingly on digital objects as a means of developing and sharing knowledge within an organisation. The maturation of a digital object is important because only those objects that mature lead to actual products. There is, however, a catch 22. For objects to mature, they have to be shared; conversely, only mature objects tend to be shared. This interplay between the functional and social dimensions of object maturation and its role in product development has not been researched.Building on the relational view of objects, we theorise product development as an ensemble of myopic maturation processes of objects that recursively move between formal and informal networks in the organisation using sharing systems such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Investigating patterns, i.e., sequences of events, in these maturation processes is a way to understand how firms overcome this catch 22 situation.We study four product innovation projects in a home appliances company, tracing the maturation and sharing processes of three types of digital objects, namely marketing specifications, technical specifications and virtual prototypes. We find that sharing – maturation patterns are affected by interpersonal networks and by team sharing atmosphere. We also find that sharing and object maturation interactions are coordinated informally through interpersonal networks and formally through PLM systems and stage-gate mechanisms.

Music is a self-evident crucial part of the human experience across cultures, with artefacts dating as far back as the last Ice Age. Music is, as well, an essential aspect of human communication, profoundly influencing the meaning of communication, perception, and behaviour. Music’s critical role is recognised in many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and marketing. The objective of this Issues and Opinions paper is to discuss theoretical insights concerning the effects of music stimuli, and to describe how that insight applies to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contexts. As ICT becomes ever more ubiquitous, and as background music becomes ever more an integral part of ICT interfaces, including music in IS research presents increasing theoretical and practical importance.

Kudos and thanks to the three editors of the special issue Ulrike Schultze, Lars Mathiassen and Michel Avital. They, together with the reviewers and of course the authors, deserve to be congratulat...

Since its inception, the editors of the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) have been determined to make it a place for interesting discussions of research about meaningful problems – di...

In a recent editorial, EJIS editors got together to draw out the philosophy, vision, and practices of our current view of the journal (Te’eni et al, 2015). We called for submissions in a diverse se...

The European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) is among the best in the field, and all of us – the editorial board and the EJIS community – should be proud of it. We should also be willing to d...

After two consecutive special issues in March and May, the first on IS in mergers and acquisitions and the second on cross-cultural IS research, the current issue seems to be a special issue (but a...

With this issue we conclude 2015 and are about to enter 2016, closing a quarter of a century, which has taken the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) out of the 20th century, in which th...

It is a true pleasure to introduce this issue. It is simply interesting and insightful. In a previous editorial, we discussed ways of promoting circles of discourse within the community in general ...

This is my first opportunity as editor to address the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) community, and I take great pleasure in doing so. We are a diverse community of readers, authors...

Abstract In this article we offer a new approach to evaluating Organizational Memory (OM). Our proposed evaluation methodology, named KnowledgeEco, is based on an ontology for the domain of OM. Its key steps are: 1) mapping the OM in the evaluated organization onto the ontology concepts; 2) noting which entities from the ontology are missing in the OM; and 3) applying a series of rules that help assess the impact of the OM on organizational learning. This systematic evaluation thus helps to propose ways to improve the evaluated OM. We present three case studies that demonstrate the feasibility of KnowledgeEco for evaluating OM and for suggesting improvements. We also identify some weaknesses in the OMs common to the three organizations cited in the case studies. Finally, we discuss how the KnowledgeEco ontology‐based methodology establishes utility and contributes to further research in the field of OM.

We review the status of European publishing in high-impact Information System (IS) journals finding that the European publication record is disappointing. We consider popular explanations to this state of affairs and find them neither credible nor useful for improving the European record. We propose several constructive reasons for this including (1) the lack of appreciation of the article genre, (2) weak publishing cultures, (3) inadequate Ph.D. preparation for article publishing, (4) weak reviewing practices, (5) poorer command of research methods, (6) poorer understanding of the reviewing protocols, and (7) institutional shaping of research funding in Europe. We formulate several recommendations to affect these causes at the individual, institutional, journal, and European community level.