Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Digital Transformations

The challenges within the area of digitalisation are numerous and how we handle them is crucial for the future. The purpose of the knowledge environment Digital Transformations is to tackle these societal challenges by developing and disseminating the knowledge required to create digitally competent people and organizations, who in turn can accomplish a sustainable digital society.

Societal challenge: digital transformations

The Swedish Government Office's digitalisation strategy describes how societal development today and in the foreseeable future will be shaped by digitalisation. Important societal challenges that digitalisation affects are, of course, how we can best achieve the various aspects of sustainability – generation of and access to new knowledge, economic welfare and social inclusion, to name just a few. The societal challenges associated with digital transformations are complex and require knowledge and vision that combine different perspectives and many angles.

What is a Linnaeus Knowledge Environment?

Meeting societal challenges with knowledge in creative environments that integrate education, research, and collaboration – knowledge environments – is something that permeates Linnaeus University’s vision and work.

Ten of our knowledge environments have been appointed Linnaeus Knowledge Environment. They all work interdisciplinary in order to get a broad take on the societal challenges within each field.

The knowledge environment Digital Transformations brings together cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise to identify and better understand the opportunities and societal challenges that digitalization brings to diverse sectors. Our approach builds upon cross-disciplinary perspectives that engage in activities within fields such as digital businesses, digital health, digital learning, and digital humanities. The activities include research and education competence development in close collaboration with the surrounding society.

Digital Transformations provides a platform that brings together research, education, and private and public sectors with a commitment to different aspects of digital transformations. By gathering diverse sectors, the knowledge environment fosters collaboration to holistically tackle multiple social, cultural, technological, economical, and organizational dimensions of digital transformations. Through novel applied research in collaboration with diverse stakeholders, Digital Transformations aims to generate knowledge to contribute to a just, equal, and sustainable digital society.

About Digital Transformations and the societal challenges

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Research

The knowledge environment Digital Transformations includes well-established and internationally recognized researchers and research groups. Within the extensive competence that exists in the environment, our goal is to integrate different knowledge and activities from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is to identify, develop and validate sustainable solutions to meet society's challenges. The research carried out in the knowledge environment also includes collaboration with local and global actors in the public sector and industry. This contributes to both broader and deeper analyzes of digital transformations through different sectors and fields.

An effective, sustainable digitalisation requires an interdisciplinary perspective. This perspective should include not only technical aspects that are about creating, storing, processing and visualizing data, but also a user-centered perspective that takes into account behaviour, socialization, policy instruments and analysis of possible rebound effects.

With its expertise in computer science, digital humanities, e-health, business administration, informatics, media technology and sociology, the environment will have a unique ability to contribute to possible solutions to the above challenges from a holistic perspective.

Education

Digital transformations work strategically to provide opportunities to create new, interdisciplinary educations, as well as develop existing programs that have a direct connection to the field. Researchers and teachers with different backgrounds in computer science, informatics, media technology, sociology, library science, health informatics and business administration work together to be able to provide new perspectives on and applications in different areas. This will give our students a clear and modern competence that makes them especially attractive to employers.

The establishment of new educations at advanced level has already started. Today, we run several new master programmes with a focus on e-health, digital humanities, educational technology and digital business. Renewal of existing courses and programmes within the knowledge environment will be a central issue for the knowledge formation.

We also see great opportunities to create new courses and master programmes together with other universities in Sweden and various universities in Europe within the framework of our European cooperation project EUniWell.

Collaboration

We have well-developed collaborations with a number of well-respected universities, both regionally, nationally and internationally. Researchers within Digital Transformations collaborate very actively with various actors in the public sector, including several municipalities and regions, with other authorities in Sweden, as well as with various companies both in Sweden and abroad.

Steering group

The steering group's main commistion includes the following tasks:

  • To develop a business plan for activities within Digital Transformations.
  • To develop a budget for the knowledge environment for the coming years.
  • To develop an organization for the operational work of Digital Transformations.

The operational work includes coordinating external grant applications and coordinating research within the environment. Also to identify new possible research areas, links to relevant educations and implications for collaboration and commissioned training.

Marcelo Milrad is contact person and chair of Digital Transformations.

Operational group

Based on assignments from Digital Transformations' steering group, the operational group works with the continued development of the knowledge environment according to the items under the heading Steering group above.