Collaboration has been increasingly required
to address the current challenges faced by
organizations. With digitalization, these
challenges are more and more complex but have
common characteristics: they concern the
organization as a whole, involve different and
heterogeneous stakeholders, and evolve during the
organization’s lifetime. Moreover, they are at the
heart of a paradox: they are of paramount
importance for companies, but they are very
difficult to grasp. Although practitioners have
developed very different definitions and
perspectives, each challenge needs to be
collectively addressed as the result of discussion
and inquiry from different perspectives. These
challenges are, for instance, developing
innovative solutions to face rapidly changing
environments, digitalizing processes, developing
business ecosystems, defining projects or
initiatives, fostering creativity, or designing and
evaluating a new business model.
Recently a “new” generation of tools has
appeared. These tools are commonly called
“canvas” as they were initially inspired by the
Business Model Canvas. In fact, we designate this
family of tools as visual inquiry tools or visual
collaborative tools. These tools have common
features that allow diverse stakeholders that face a
joint problem to address the aforementioned
challenges:
• First, developing a shared language and
understanding of the problem they are trying to
solve.
• Second, assisting diverse groups in exploring
and/or brainstorming on a given problem
thanks to their support for structuring and
bounding the problem.
• Third, supporting a less linear and more
creative and innovative process mainly relying
on design techniques as they allow a social
design process, which has been proven useful
to increase engagement within projects.
Given the increasing amount and use of such
visual inquiry tools, it seems crucial to
accumulate knowledge on how to develop and
evaluate them. Research is needed both into the
design processes of such tools and/or their
modelling, as well as their ontological and/or
cognitive foundations. For the second year, this
has been the main motivation to organize this
mini-track at HICSS-53, as we believe that the IS
discipline is well-suited to contribute to the design
of such visual collaborative tools as it has a long
tradition in design science research, modelling
and UX.