Research Perspectives: The Quest for Innovation in Information Systems Research: Recognizing, Stimulating, and Promoting Novel and Useful Knowledge

Authors

Varun Grover, University of ArkansasFollow
Fred Niederman, St. Louis UniversityFollow

Abstract

Research in information systems (IS) is often challenged during the review process with “what’s new” and the “so what” questions. While we believe that there is innovation in IS research, constituents in the field do not have a good or at least consistent understanding of what this entails. This creates a problem for editors, authors, and reviewers in assessing how innovative a study is or what aspects of the work are indeed innovative. This paper is a response to this concern that takes on the challenging task of recognizing innovation in IS research. At the most basic level, we offer a structure that examines a variety of ways that innovation may be manifested in our research output. We describe, illustrate, and discuss the challenges of using our categories of innovative research. We hope that such identification can stimulate and expand our capacity to generate innovative research and to recognize (and promote) it when it is forthcoming.

Recommended Citation

Grover, Varun and Niederman, Fred (2021) "Research Perspectives: The Quest for Innovation in Information Systems Research: Recognizing, Stimulating, and Promoting Novel and Useful Knowledge," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 22(6), 1753-1782.
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00705
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol22/iss6/1

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00705