Offered Subjects

Important Notes

Please read the following notes before contacting us and/or submitting your application:

  • The Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management can offer supervision of Bachelor/Master theses only to students enrolled as Business Information Systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik) students or students of the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics. All other students are required by examination regulations to have supervision by their faculty. Those requirements are not subject to any exceptions so please only apply in case you meet them to avoid unnecessary time effort and rejections.
  • The Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management can offer supervision of Bachelor/Master theses written only in English language.
  • We would like to inform you that due to capacity constraints, we are currently only accepting new supervisees on a waiting list basis. Interested students should send their proposed research topic, curriculum vitae, and transcript of records to the designated supervisor. However, you should be aware that you will be placed on a waiting list and that it will take 3 to 9 months, depending on the topic area, before you will be offered a supervison. Thank you for your understanding.

Offered Subjects

Filter:
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "Personal Productivity"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Falco Korn, M.Sc.
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "Sustainable Cities"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Fabian Lohmar, M.Sc.
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "Data Eco Systems"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Tim Brée, M.Sc.
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "Goal Setting" and "Personal Productivity"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Alexandar Schkolski, M.Sc.
  • Master thesis on "How municipal enterprises’ innovation culture influences the effectiveness of digital innovation activity"Details

    Vacant master thesis seeks to investigate and assess how municipal enterprises’ innovation culture influences the effectiveness of digital innovation activity

    Against the backdrop of climate change and digitalization, cities all over the world are facing the need for a radical transformation towards “smartness” (Gimpel et al., 2021). To meet the increasing amount of customer expectations that cities are facing, municipal enterprises – such as electricity suppliers or waste management services – are continuously working on modernizing their digital service offerings and business models (Hosseini et al., 2018; Mora et al., 2019). Sometimes those offerings represent the replacement of analog tasks with digital tasks, for example, online appointment scheduling or the application of IoT sensors to enhance processes or estimate waiting times[1]. Such novel digital services are often the result of digital innovation activities (Hjalmarsson & Rudmark, 2012). Those innovation activities may be internally and externally driven, and in light of the smart city context, the complexity of the innovation process is increasing (Hjalmarsson & Rudmark, 2012).

    This is among the reasons why digital innovations are increasingly critical to the success of municipal enterprises. Yet, the municipal sector could be characterized as rather non-innovative and reluctant to change (Hawlitschek, 2021). While the need for digital innovation is widely acknowledged, implementing the right measures (e.g., competence building, structural adjustments, new processes, and new forms of collaboration) is still a challenge to municipal enterprises. Further, measuring innovativeness is a challenging task (Hinings et al., 2018; Van Looy, 2021).

    All those challenges as well as the rapid environmental developments are creating a very demanding situation for municipal companies, which are often characterized by highly bureaucratic processes, a strict matrix organization, and using static workflow processes that remain unchanged possibly even for decades. To this end, research finds that the innovation culture significantly impacts the degree of organizations’ innovativeness (Dobni, 2008; Dodge et al., 2017). However, less attention has been devoted to grasp the influence of municipal enterprises’ innovation culture on (digital) innovativeness. To address those challenges, municipal enterprises may benefit from a systematic approach to evaluate their innovation culture’s maturity level as well as degree of digital innovativeness and compare their maturity level to similar organizations.

    To address this issue, we are looking for an engaged student who will address this topic within the scope of a master thesis. First, the student is expected to conduct a profound literature review and gather relevant findings from academia and practice. Further, those findings are to be extended by conducting interviews with representatives from German municipal enterprises to define and uncover the nature and relationships of municipal enterprises’ innovation culture and digital innovativeness. Subsequently, the student is expected to develop a measurement instrument (i.e., survey) that later allows measuring municipal enterprises’ innovation culture, its maturity level as well as its impact on the effectiveness of digital innovation activity.

    References

    Dobni, C. B. (2008). Measuring innovation culture in organizations: The development of a generalized innovation culture construct using exploratory factor analysis. European journal of innovation management.

    Dodge, R., Dwyer, J., Witzeman, S., Neylon, S., & Taylor, S. (2017). The Role of Leadership in Innovation: A quantitative analysis of a large data set examines the relationship between organizational culture, leadership behaviors, and innovativeness. Research-Technology Management, 60(3), 22-29.

    Gimpel, H., Graf-Drasch, V., Hawlitschek, F., & Neumeier, K. (2021). Designing smart and sustainable irrigation: A case study. Journal of Cleaner Production, 315, 128048.

    Hawlitschek, F. (2021). Interview with Benjamin Scheffler on “The future of waste management”. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 63(2), 207-211.

    Hinings, B., Gegenhuber, T., & Greenwood, R. (2018). Digital innovation and transformation: An institutional perspective. Information and Organization, 28(1), 52-61.

    Hjalmarsson, A., & Rudmark, D. (2012). Designing digital innovation contests. In International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems (pp. 9-27). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

    Hosseini, S., Frank, L., Fridgen, G., & Heger, S. (2018). Do not forget about smart towns. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 60(3), 243-257.

    Mora, L., Deakin, M., & Reid, A. (2019). Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142, 70-97.

    Van Looy, A. (2021). A quantitative and qualitative study of the link between business process management and digital innovation. Information & Management, 58(2), 103413.


    [1] Example: www.wbd-innovativ.de/projekte/intelligenter-recyclinghof


    Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Tim Brée, M.Sc.
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "IT Project Management"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Anna Yuliarti Khodijah, M.Sc.
  • Bachelor/Master thesis in the area of "Organizational Behaviour"
    Bachelorarbeit, Masterarbeit, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ansprechpartner: Anna Yuliarti Khodijah, M.Sc.

Further Thesis Topics

In the context of our research project on Individual Productivity we offer a diverse set of bachelor and master theses. The following list contains potential topics that may be tailored and refined according to the current state of the research project and individual preferences:

Bachelor/Master:

  • Charting Productivity Tool Innovations (Marktanalyse)
  • Personal Productivity and Productivity Tools in Information Systems Research – A Comprehensive Literature Review
  • Research on Personal Productivity Tools – A Literature Review
  • Towards An Object Model for the Personal Productivity Domain

Master:

  • Toxic Productivity and Its Influence on Well-Being: An Exploratory Study
  • Current Research on Attention and Focus and its Implications for Personal Productivity Software Design
  • Current Research on Memory and Learning and its Implications for Personal Productivity Software Design
  • Current Psychological Research on Creativity and its Implications for Personal Productivity Software Design
  • Current Psychological Research on Multitasking and its Implications for Personal Productivity Software Design
  • Investigating the Phenomenon of Technostress and its Implications for Personal Productivity
  • Gamification and its Potential and Implications for the Design of Personal Productivity Software
  • The Role and Potential of Visual Framing for the Design of Personal Productivity Software
  • Artificial Intelligence and its Potential for Personal Productivity Software
  • The Role of Habits for Personal Productivity
  • The Role of (Life) Goals for Personal Productivity

In case you are interested in one of the topics, please do not hesitate to contact us for further information.