Panel: Grant Writing

Grant writing has become a major component of many academicians’ careers. As funding for projects becomes scarce at colleges and universities, external grants provide an excellent opportunity to fund small to large research studies that have an impact across a variety of fields and contexts. This panel will explore the process of grant writing, including locating, planning, writing, reviewing, and managing grants. The panelists provide a wide variety of grant writing experience. In particular the panel will cover topics include locating, planning, writing, reviewing, and managing a grant. Each panelist will highlight the following when discussing each topic: What are possible approaches when targeting a particular agency? How to match your research to fit with a request for proposal? How to avoid key pitfalls when pursuing external funding

Incommensurability and Multi-paradigm Grounding in Design Science Research: Implications for Creating Knowledge

International audienceThe problem identification-design-build-evaluate-theorize structure of design science research has been proposed as an approach to creating knowledge in information systems and in broader organizational and social domains. Although the approach has merit, the philosophical foundations of two specific components warrant attention. First, the grounding of design theory on potentially incommensurate kernel theories may produce incoherent design theory. In addition, design theory has no strong logical connection to kernel theories, and so cannot be used to test or validate the contributing kernel theories. Second, the philosophical grounding of evaluation may inadvertently shift from functionally based measures of utility and efficiency, to evaluation based on the pragmatic fulfillment of multidimensional human actions as people encounter information systems, resulting in evaluation errors. Although design and evaluation from a single paradigm is not desirable, sufficient, or representative of design science research, multi-paradigm grounding of design and evaluation must be realized and used consciously by the research community if the design science approach is to remain a legitimate approach to knowledge creation

Style composition in action research publication

Examining action research publications in leading Information Systems journals as a particular genre of research communication, we develop the notion of style composition to understand how authors structure their arguments for a research contribution. We define style composition as the activity through which authors select, emphasize, and present elements of their research to establish premises, develop inferences, and present contributions in publications. Drawing on this general notion, we identify a set of styles that is characteristic of how IS action researchers compose their argument. Premise styles relate to the dual goals of action research through practical or theoretical positioning of the argument; inference styles combine insights from the problem-solving and the research cycles through inductive or deductive reasoning; and contribution styles focus on different types of contributions—experience report, field study, theoretical development, problem-solving method, and research method. Based on the considered sample, we analyze the styles adopted in selected publications and show that authors have favored certain styles while leaving others underexplored; further, we reveal important strengths and weaknesses in the composition of styles within the IS discipline. Based on these insights, we discuss how action research practices and writing can be improved, as well as how to further develop style compositions to support the publication of engaged scholarship research

Designing for end-user development in the internet of things

With the widespread of Internet of Things\u2019 devices, sensors, and applications the quantity of collected data grows enormously and the need of extracting, merging, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing it paves the way for new research challenges. This ongoing revolution of how personal devices are used and how they are becoming more and more wearable has important influences on the most well established definitions of end user and end-user development. The paper presents an analysis of the most diffused applications that allow end users to aggregate quantified-self data, originated by several sensors and devices, and to use it in personalized ways. From the outcomes of the analysis, we present a classification model for Internet of Things and new EUD paradigm and language that extends the ones existing in the current state of the art Internet of Things