I’m originally from Sweden. That's a country in Scandinavia and I’ve spent a great part of my initial career in Sweden. I earned my PhD there. I come from a city in the north. It’s pretty remote, there’s lots of snow. Then I moved on to the Umea, which is also in the north, but it’s a university city where I did my undergraduate as well as my PhD. Then I moved to the southwest of Sweden, in Gothenburg, where I spent ten years. I now live in the UK since five years ago and work at Warwick Business School there. I’ve been visiting a few places, but not really living. I do love sports in general, but I really like winter sports like ice hockey, for one example, and unfortunately the country where I’ve come to live, ice hockey is a very small sports. I’ve learnt to like some of the sports they have over here including hockey, more like land hockey. Both of my children do that, and I very much enjoy that. I like skiing a lot, so every year we go back to Sweden to my mother, who is from one of the major ski resorts. We go there every Easter for some skiing with the children.

We have an undergraduate currently. It's our second year now. It’s called Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurships. We have an entrepreneurship touch to our undergraduate. We have typical IS topics including Programming and Database Modelling and so on and so forth. On top of that, we offer modules on Digital Ventures and on Design Thinking. We also have one core module on Funding your Digital Venture, since we have that touch to it. For a long time, for some reason the UK hasn’t got much of an IS undergraduate tradition. We had our Masters program for long, but the undergraduate is pretty new. This new branding has proved to be successful and let's see when the first batch students receive their degree. I think the job prospects should be pretty good. On top of that, I’m heading the Information Systems and Management group, which is also a home group for two other programs on the Masters level. One of them is Management of Information Systems and the other is Digital Innovation. It’s a typical MIS. We do have a Data Analytics program as well, but that’s side by side with the IS program. The IS program will now offer Cyber Security, Programming, Digital Business Strategy. We also have traditional OB modules. It would cover topics like how does information technology shape the future workplace, what are the new business models that come with digital innovation and so on. Students have been pretty successful in getting jobs after this, so we're pretty happy with this. The students coming in are really a mixed bunch, some of them having a technical background, some of them having a more general management or marketing background. That’s a bit challenging actually, it means that some of the technical courses are challenging for some students; but it makes it interesting too. We also have a Business Consultancy Masters program.

I earned my PhD in ’99; I've been changing topics along the way. Currently, broadly speaking, I am doing Digital Innovation research. That would include looking at industries that become digitalized in some way, some of their products and services become digitalized, and looking at what the strategy interpretations, the organizational implications have been. This is coming from my Viktoria Institute time in Gothenburg, where I worked a lot with the automotive industry. We studied how automobiles become digitized and what that meant to the future of the industry. At that time, I worked with AGM and Saab Automobile on their first android-based open platform in a car and it was called Saab Icon. Unfortunately Saab got broke just a few years after this, but at the time we really thought it was the leading edge. In terms of research output from that, there came a couple of papers about the challenges involved when manufacturing companies take on digital technology, which is a way manufacturing can be able to reach economics. The scale is very different from the digital world where the technology can be reprogrammed. We have a couple of publications there including some of my former PhD students. Recently I’ve also done a lot of work on the theme of scaling and growth. I have been very interested in how digital ventures grow so rapidly if you compare them to traditional manufacturing companies. It seems that a digital venture can become big very quickly. They do that by focusing on the userbase. The traditional way we speak about growth in companies is in terms of market share, revenues, number of employees and so on. But certainly in the digital age, you can see how users come first and if you have a big userbase and you can achieve network effects, eventually you become valuable. That's why we have this expressional ability to control markets in the digital age, it’s related. Recently we’re running a special issue on digital entrepreneurship and IS. We’re currently doing some small steps, looking at what does mean to be an entrepreneur when digital technology is involved. We’re finalizing a special issue in ISR on platforms and infrastructure, which is also an interest of mine. That's partly different from the Digital Innovation stream. We’re doing some stuff around how platform owners can stimulate general activity. I have a few students looking into what we’ve purchased from resources like ePrice, SDcase and other things and how they can be important mechanisms in governing platforms. Then I'm working on various topics, given that I’m head of group and partly relying on what other people are interested in. But I’ve been fortunate to do most of my research in these two broad themes.