Data Innovation: Designing Data-Producing Arrangements for Enhanced Value Creation

We are excited to announce that Professor Aleksi Aaltonen, Associate Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, will be visiting the Einstein Center Digital Future on May 5th, 2025, and Freie Universität on May 6th, 2025. During his stay, he will share insights from his extensive research and expertise in data innovation, focusing on the intriguing topic: "Data Innovation: Designing Data-Producing Arrangements for Enhanced Value Creation". Students are invited to attend his research talk and may also schedule 1:1 sessions for personalized guidance on their research questions.

When: May 6th, 2025, 12:00–14:00
Where: Lecture Hall B, Henry Ford Building

Professor Aaltonen's research explores how organizations innovate and create value using data, with a focus on the social and organizational processes behind data-driven innovation. He also studies knowledge collaboration, such as how platforms like Wikipedia manage and govern contributions from distributed users. His work combines insights from information systems, organization theory, and digital innovation.

In his current work, Professor Aaltonen challenges the traditional assumption that data are neutral representations of reality, readily available for use. Instead, he shows that all data are human-made—shaped by choices, practices, and technological constraints—and must be deliberately produced. While conceptual modeling has long been the dominant lens in information systems research, his work highlights the need to understand how data-producing arrangements are designed in real-world organizational settings. Framing data themselves as innovations, he argues, is appropriate when the creation of novel or improved data enables new forms of value creation or organizational action. This perspective invites attention to the interpretive frameworks that make data meaningful, the evolution of data over time, and the flow of data across systems. His talk will illustrate these ideas through a case vignette on gender identity data and explore implications for digital innovation, classification, data quality, and data justice.

Biography

Aleksi Aaltonen is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Stevens Institute of Technology and serves as a Deputy Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Information Technology. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and studies data and data-based innovation and organizing using a variety of methods. His publications have appeared in leading academic journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and in other high-quality journals. Before joining academia, Aleksi worked for CMI – Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation founded by Nobel Peace Laureate and former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari, and founded an activity tracking app Moves that was acquired by Facebook in 2014. He currently maintains the Data Studies Bibliography, http://datastudiesbibliography.org, that is a resource for management scholars interested in data as an object of research. You can read more about Aleksi from his website at http://aleksi.info

This visit provides students with a unique opportunity to learn from Professor Aaltonen’s research, as it offers practical insights into how data and digital technologies can be strategically used to drive innovation and collaboration in modern organizations.