Electronic Markets and conference contributions

Abstract

Dear readers of Electronic Markets, You may be aware of the close ties between our journal and the Bled eConference. Both have become of age and passed their adolescence with Electronic Markets in its 23 year and the Bled eConference in its 26. The vivid relationship is based on a mutual support of both the conference attendees and officers on the one hand as well as the members of the Editorial Board and authors of research articles in Electronic Markets on the other. In particular, most annual meetings of the Editorial Board have been hosted in the picturesque surroundings of Lake Bled. Two special issues (see editorials from Schmid & Buchet 2000 and Zimmermann et al. 2007) and several papers for our general research section have been developed from the conference for publication in Electronic Markets. In order to reflect this relationship the editors of Electronic Markets together with the officials of the Bled Conference decided to enter into a strategic partnership in 2006. We value the Bled eConference community as a strong supporter of our journal and are honored that two colleagues followed our invitation to summarize the main research streams at the conference. In their paper, Andreja Pucihar from the host university of the Bled eConference and Roger Clarke who has served in many functions at the conference almost from the beginning identify the three phases of IS research in relation to “e”: EDI (1988–1995), eCommerce (1996–2004), and eInteraction (2005-now) (Clarke and Pucihar 2013). Their research is based on the remarkable total of 824 double-blind reviewed research papers which were published at the conference between 1995 and 2012. The paper tells the compelling story of the Bled eConference and also takes a critical look at how research topics were (not) taken up by practitioners. From this perspective the authors provide some insights into how conferences and reviewing policies may be designed to foster relevant and rigorous research. We are convinced that the results of this paper will serve as a reference for future research in the field of electronic business, as well as for the discussion of research design in our discipline. To support this purpose, this paper will also be available via the open access option and we look forward to its broad dissemination. In addition the invited paper provides an introduction to the articles in this special issue which presents a selection of papers from the Bled conferences in 2011 and 2012. All six papers show the scope of the topics that were relevant for the Bled conferences. They are more or less directly related to the interorganizational application of information systems (IOS) and vary regarding their perspective from interaction with consumers, the governance of security, methodologies guiding research stakeholder analyses in IOS and the link to enterprise information systems. We are glad that one of the papers, i.e. the article on “Dynamic stakeholder interaction analysis: Innovative smart living design cases” is also freely accessible via Electronic Market’s SpringerLink website (Solaimani, Guldemond and Bouwman 2013). The papers are introduced by the guest editors in their separate preface which was jointly written by Research Track Chairs of the Bled eConference in 2011 (Ulrike Lechner) and 2012 (Hans-Dieter Zimmermann). Both guided and directed an intensive review process where the conference papers received fundamental revisions. We would like to thank the guest editors, all reviewers, and, of course, the authors for their efforts. R. Alt (*) University of Leipzig, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: rainer.alt@uni-leipzig.de