Pathfinder-Project Mapping Interdisciplinary Knowledge Landscapes

 

Project Partners:

School of Business and Economics:

Professor Torsten-Oliver Salge from the Innovation, Strategy and Organisation Group

Dr. David Antons from the Innovation, Strategy and Organisation Group

Thomas Bohné, Ph.D . from the Innovation, Strategy and Organisation Group

Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Natural Sciences:

Professor Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group

Project start:

 

The project addresses the challenge to systematically identify, map, and track existing knowledge in knowledge-intensive organizations such as universities or large technology companies.

Complexity and interdisciplinary in organizations in such organizations increase and the awareness of – and ability to identify – relevant knowledge decreases accordingly. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical situation that organizations that crucially depend on knowledge “do not know what they know”.

By developing a unique topic modeling approach for interdisciplinary knowledge management the project addresses this challenge. Topic modeling uses tools from Bayesian statistics and computer science to examine vast amounts of text data to discover logically coherent topics. This approach enables the researcher to systematically identify and visualize topics. By doing this the approach contributes a much-needed methodology to knowledge management and fills a gap that hitherto has not been addressed by national or international public funding programs.

The method that is going to be developed can be used in research and in practice to facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation. Hence, it is important for both, management and research.

The interdisciplinary project team has proven expertise in the technical and conceptual aspects of the project and demonstrable ability to carry out interdisciplinary research.

We are looking forward to support this project!