Martin Gersch and Nina Schlömer receive the “Most Innovative Paper” Award at the European Conference on Information Systems

The research paper “Visualising Digital Transformation: The Performative Role of Academic Figures” by Martin Gersch, professor of business administration at Freie Universität Berlin and co-spokesperson of the ECDF, and Nina Schlömer, researcher at the School of Business & Economics at Freie Universität Berlin, won the prestigious Claudio Ciborra Award for the most innovative paper at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2026 in Milan. Gersch and Schlömer’s paper was selected from over 1,400 submissions.

In their paper, Martin Gersch and Nina Schlömer demonstrate that academic figures are not neutral illustrations. Rather, they (re)produce specific, often unquestioned assumptions about how digital transformation unfolds and how steerable it is. For this study, the researchers conducted a visual analysis of 176 figures from 138 academic articles on digital transformation — a novel approach in business informatics. Using a three-level coding structure, detailed visual elements (e.g., boxes, arrows, lines) are grouped into recurring visual patterns and ultimately into five classes of visual representations of digital transformation. The results show that linear and quasi-causal representations—which suggest a high degree of controllability—are particularly dominant. This holds true even for articles that actually emphasize something else in the text. The paper invites researchers to reflect more deeply on visual representations and provides suitable guiding questions for authors to this end.

According to the VHB Rating 2024 (Association of University Professors of Business Administration), ECIS is one of only two conferences worldwide in the field of business informatics to receive an “A” rating and is the most important such conference in Europe. The award honors the memory of Claudio Ciborra, an influential researcher in the field of organizational theory at the London School of Economics, and recognizes the most innovative work presented at ECIS conferences.