IoT is about curiosity, openness, and friendship

Back in 2017, IPSERA conference was in Hungary. We had our first SIG meeting and our first PDW on the internet of things. We felt that we needed to bring together members of the IPSERA community together. And the intent was nothing less than grandiose. It was expressed in a short opening we wrote and shared at that time “The Internet of thing (IOT) will bring a tectonic change in the structure of industries in the next 20 years. More disruptions and value chains reconfigurations must be anticipated. We have only seen the first sparks of a broad transformation. Many industry architectures will be significantly and sometime radically transformed”

And we claimed that we needed to study how “PSM functions will evolve on the forefront of such business-critical changes.”

Since 2017, we have pursued our exchanges through physical and virtual sessions; we discussed many times the scope of the SIG and we kept it rather open. We are interested in the role of PSM in sourcing digital capabilities and we are also interested in how digital technologies shape PSM organizations.

Through SIG & PDW we want to stimulate the international exchange of curiosity and experience among young and experienced researchers. The regular, open and friendly exchange of research approaches, methods, views and early research results on this complex topic, which will have a lasting impact on and change purchasing, appears to be increasingly important for participants to strive for open and holistic views. In addition, the early exchange of research projects stimulated and consolidated further work and cooperation among the members. 

We shared our research interests; our research papers and we also built some common tools for data collection. We often discussed future research questions but most importantly we built a friendly and open network of academics who shared knack for technology, and it impact on SCM and PSM. Over time we have turned conversations into collaborations and landed a few papers in in our favorite journals such as JPSM and IJOPM

In 2020 with the pandemic we kept our meeting virtual. It was great to see the faces of everyone smiling as we were joining our virtual sessions. It felt nice comforting and motivating to be altogether sharing news, interest, and research work.

Today the IPSERA IoT SIG might sound like a place where we talk about technology, but it is first and foremost an agora were curiosity, openness, and friendship blends together.

And …. We will meet again!

Michael Henke, Hervé Legenvre & Herbert Ruile