Relevance through Consortium Research? Findings from an Expert Interview Study

The Information Systems (IS) community is discussing the relevance of its research. Design-oriented IS research is considered a promising approach since it combines practical relevance and scientific rigor. Only limited guidance, however, is available for the researcher to gain access to and exchange knowledge from the practitioners’ domain. This is surprising insofar as the IS “ecosystem” is under change and research and innovation largely takes place in the practitioners’ community. Consortium research addresses the issue of getting access to and exchanging knowledge from the practitioners’ community. It supports the development of artifacts and is characterized by close cooperation between the university and its partners in all stages of the design-oriented research process, practical validation of research results with partner companies, and a focus on the practical benefits of the research, with all research activities being funded by the consortium partners. The research question posed in this paper is what consortium research contributes to design-oriented IS research against the background of the aforementioned phenomena. The paper presents the findings from an expert interview study among professors of the German-speaking IS community in Europe.