Having a Positive Impact with Design Science Research – Learning from Effective Altruism

Context in Design Science Research: Taxonomy and Framework

“…In the dimension scope, we aim to capture the relative size of a context in relation to the environment. We recognize four different characteristics, namely local, domain, global, and universal [6]. The local scope encompasses the real world directly surrounding or immediately impacting the focal phenomenon.…”

“…We did not find any occurrence of a global scope or a universal scope in our analysis. Nevertheless, we still decided to keep them in the taxonomy as these scopes have been argued to be neglected but important scopes for impactful DSR [6].…”

“…In the following we are discussing Figure 2 by rows. We suggest that, starting in the problem awareness stage of the general DSR cycle, a DSR project or stream should ideally consider all three functions of context as well as consider context across all scopes before moving on to the next stage [2,6]. This leads to 12 stereotypical context configurations with a problem focus.…”

“…In the suggestion stage of the general DSR cycle, a context focus on strategy is likely to become more predominant. Again, in this stage a DSR project or stream should ideally consider all context functions and scopes before moving on to the next stage [2,6]. This leads to the identification of 12 stereotypical context configurations with a strategy focus.…”

“…Design science research (DSR) in information systems (IS) is a research paradigm striving to provide the theoretical foundation for scientifically sound, real world problem solving [1][2][3][4]. As such, DSR has an important role to play if IS researchers want to answer calls for a more responsible engagement with our world's needs [5][6][7]. One important and largely unresolved methodological challenge in DSR (and, indeed, IS research at large) is the question of how to think about and deal with the notion of context [8,9].…”