Well thanks for having me first of all, appreciate this. I'm a German, actually, I was born in Essen in North Rhine-Westphalia which is the most population they say with the highest population density in Germany. That's remarkable because when I was about 20 something I migrated to Australia which is a very sparse country. So in Australia which is almost the size of the US, you have about 20 something 22-million people living and in that tiny little states in Germany where I was born there’s 24-million and Australia overall is around twenty times the size of Germany. It's very, very different, it’s not a lot of people here. So I lived in Australia around for fifteen years in total and now I migrated back to Europe to be close to the family etc. In terms of, I lived in the States a little bit but nothing as long, I was in New York for a while, and I was in Canada, on sabbatical, which I also very much enjoyed, the west coast. And terms of the things I enjoyed I'm in, I'm in basketball I tried and I wasn’t very, wasn’t very tall, I was one of the smaller guys on the field. I'm around 6’3 roughly so that's just tall enough for basketball. And I like literature, classic literature I like reading some of the great novels about human kind I suppose, If I get the time. Is that right, when was that? Well I arrived in 2003 or 2002 I think so we just meet each other, interesting.

Yup, still the University of Cologne here in the business school. They teach all the classical business and the great programs, management, finance, accounting, marketing and information systems as a degree. So you can graduate with the Bachelor of Science in Information Systems if you so choose. And in Germany, traditional people go on and straight away, do a master’s afterwards. So, Cologne offers a Master of Science in IS and it also offers IS majors in the other business schools. Of course, you can do a master’s in MBA say with a specialization in IS. The jobs, for IS graduates are usually either in the technology management field of larger corporations. A great deal of students become consultants. Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, these types of players, they get a lot of the graduates and in Cologne is a big financial market of the financial sector is very strong here. Both the banking and the insurance companies so they do get a lot of the graduates as well in the technology management’s field. So that’s classic job profiles and I should say basically the companies are ripping the students from our hands. So we can't produce enough graduates to fill the market. So it’s a great position for any student to be an IS graduate. Probably what we offer is the undergrad is a very classical broad spectrum, we do everything, from psychology and design, programming, technology management to strategy. So, for in the master we have more specialized minors around information and value creation, data-analytics and what we call IS for sustainable society. So anything that relied sustainability topics to information systems to save physical systems. Well E-vehicles, ecology, these sorts of topics.

Well, I probably have to go back to a bit. My training was in a group that specialized in business process management. So the place where technology introduces changes to organizational routines and the ways organizations work and how these processes can be designed, improved and so for so. That’s a pretty vibrant research community stretching into computer science where they build on BPM tool sets to organizational clients where they think about how, you know, how process can be managed. That’s not here nor there. It is very interesting. That was my training, I think was on in ten years. The other training that I’ve had was in systems analysis and design, conceptual modeling. How do we describe what an information system is? How do we analyze and design? These had traditional pieces and I liked both of them because they reach very deep into you. Well, If I asked, you know, if I asked a question what is an information systems and where does it sit in relationship to the engineering disciplines and the organizational sciences. More recently, it's probably over the last ten years, I reached out firstly to the stream of people who called green IS. So the question how information systems can have a role in an environmental sustainable future? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What, can I ask you? That’s all of a niche topic still, it's not a large community but a very vibrant, very active community around 50 to hundred people working on this. So that’s one of the topics that I do and the other one that’s even more recent as we all do, we do digital innovation. My focus is more on very small companies, startups, digital entrepreneurship and very very large companies. Some of the largest players try to be innovative. And I think that’s both interesting coz the very large player always wanna be nimble and edge on like the small ones. And the small ones wanna be like the large one’s coz they wanna have the assets and the power. And this particular focus came about because for around 6 years, I’ve been holding an endowed chair that was sponsored by one of the world’s largest supermarket companies in Australia called Woolworth. It’s like a retail company like Walmart, Tesco, Walgreen, ALDI with a very big difference that operates its market but only in Australia. So its one of the world’s largest retailers stuck on a tiny little continent. A very large company and they try to be innovative and then they threw their money and bought everything digital, eye-beacons, beamers, virtual reality, 3D printing. What have you? And obviously a lot of these things didn’t work. And then the question became, you know, why such a big company that’s very good at anything technical why they’re so poor in digital innovation? And that was a very intensive work/research project that took me 6/7 years to execute completely. That’s probably the largest one I’ve worked on. At the moment we’re trying to do the exact opposite. In which we are studying a lot of very small software and hardware, perhaps. So the people who build Fitbits, Ocular Swifts, Nests, lucky charms, smart devices were asking, you know, why are there so many of them all of a sudden? Why are people building hardware? That was usually a very hard thing to do. Yeah, it’s costly, it’s rigid, you have to build a prototype then you have to build ten thousands of them. Very different challenges. And now all of a sudden people are doing this again. And I’m asking why is that? So we’re doing a blend of fieldwork where we go out into many of this start-up ecosystems, Hong-Kong, Silicon Valley, in Sydney Australia and here in Cologne, that’s pretty much an ecosystem. And we’re trying to just look over their shoulders and see what they’re doing, and are they using digital technologies and systems to help them achieve that. That’s very exciting. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I only got into this probably 3 years ago. And the reason I got into this field was in the QUT business school. My next door neighbor was a very big shot on entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurship professor and we just started talking just because we were sitting next to one another. And he had an interest in enabling entrepreneurship and I had an interest in technology side and these two fields fit together perfectly. And he has a very big interest in IS. What is an entrepreneurship? An entrepreneurship. For the people who bring the technology side into it. It’s a wonderful blend that you can basically connected to conversations that are happening in our all field as well as in the entrepreneurship field. So that’s very nice and there’s a whole of open questions left so I love to pursue that even more in the future.