Engaged Scholarship: Action Design Research for New Software Product Development

Action Design Research (ADR) has been termed a new research method for generating prescriptive design knowledge through building and evaluating ensemble IT artifacts in an organizational setting. This paper demonstrates the use of the ADR methodology in a New Software Product Development (NSPD) environment. The main argument of this paper is to investigate whether ADR facilitates engaged scholarship among IS academics and practitioners in a high pressure environment such is NSPD. Due to increased pressure on organizations to reduce costs and their time to market, the NSPD environment is increasingly not conducive to engaged scholarship. Finding an arrangement where researchers and practitioners can successfully develop both theory and artifact concurrently and in relative harmony is often crucial to the success of the new product and/or to the rigor of the research outcomes. The paper makes a contribution by providing a demonstration of successful research-practitioner engagement through the use of ADR.