Prof. Dr Jan vom Brocke, Director of the Department of Information Systems, has been awarded the Best Published Paper Award by the CTO Division of the Academy of Management, together with his co-authors Christoph J. Frick (PhD) and Prof. Dr Stefan Seidel (University of Cologne). The study, entitled “Regulating Emerging Technologies: Prospective Sensemaking Through Abstraction and Elaboration”, has been published in the prestigious journal MIS Quarterly.

The paper focuses on one of the most important questions of digital transformation: how can new technologies be regulated in such a way as to avoid harmful effects whilst at the same time promoting innovation? To get to the bottom of this tension, the authors examined the development of the blockchain law in Liechtenstein and how stakeholders from various sectors – the legal sector, regulatory authorities, government, business and technology – worked together to shape this law collectively.

Their key finding: successful regulation arises from collective, forward-looking sensemaking – a shared endeavour to achieve understanding, based on the two closely interlinked processes of abstraction and elaboration. In this way, the participants succeeded in rethinking the subject of regulation step by step: from blockchain to ‘trustworthy technology’, from cryptocurrency to the token economy, and from the traditional roles of financial service providers to new roles within technological systems.

You can read about the conclusions the authors draw from these findings regarding the regulation of technologies in the award-winning paper (open access).

You can find out more about Prof. Dr Jan vom Brocke here.