Department of Digitalization

Robert J. Kauffman is Endowed Professor of Digitalization at the Copenhagen Business School, Department of Digitalization. In 2018, he held the Otto Mønsted Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellowship. He currently conducts research on: FinTech innovations, start-ups, business processes and models; financial services and financial firms; technology innovation, process disruption and industry transformation; econometrics, ­data analytics, and causal inference;  mobile telephony, and cyber-physical tracking; digital entertainment and telecom services; airline industry, tech innovation and digital ecosystems; economics and technology; cloud computing, IT outsourcing and pricing; and energy, resources, hazardous waste, and sustainability management. Kauffman received his M.S. (Systems Science) and Ph.D. (Industrial Administration) from the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University; his M.A. from Cornell University (East Asian Studies); and his B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder (Psychology, East Asian Studies, Chinese Language). 
 

He previously served at Singapore Management University (2011-present) as a Professor of Information Systems and Management, Associate Dean of the Faculty, Associate Dean of Research, and Co-Director of the Living Analytics Research Centre (LARC), as well as holder of the Lee Kuan Yew Faculty Fellowship for Research Excellence. He is currently an Emeritus Professor there. He spent six years as Principal Investigator for LARC’s Citibank Singapore’s retail banking data analytics, and for Starhub Singapore’s digital entertainment and mobile telephony projects in LARC within a larger S$26 million research funding package. Prior, he was the W.P. Carey Chair and Professor of Information Systems at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University (2007-2011), and as Professor and Associate Professor, as well as Department Chair (Information and Decision Sciences) and Center Director (MIS Research Center) at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota (1994-2007). He also visited the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, the Simon Business School of the University of Rochester, and Economic Research at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. He began his university career at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where he held the positions of Assistant and Associate Professor (1988-1994). 

His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals around the world – for which he served on their editorial boards or in leadership roles – representing a number of different disciplines, issues, research settings and methodologies. They include: Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Information Technology and Management, Information and Management, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Electronic Markets, and others in Information Systems. His other publications have been more interdisciplinary, appearing in Economics (Review of Economics and Statistics; Managerial and Decision Economics), Organization Studies (Organization Science; Technology Forecasting and Social Change; International Journal of Business Excellence), Computer Science (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering; Communications of the ACM), Finance (Financial Innovation), Engineering (IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management), Waste and Energy Management (Resources, Conservation and Recycling; Energy Policy), Geography (Applied Geography), and Hotel and Tourism Management (Cornell Hospitality Quarterly).
 

He has recently ranked around 20th in the IS discipline in terms of an h-index score for citations of 69 and is ranked 9th  among Danish research scientists. He also has guided more than 40 Ph.D. students toward their doctoral degree and Ph.D. thesis research. He served in the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Doctoral Consortium three times, as well as in similar meetings in other professional society settings. He has also been a frequent Best Research Award winner (IEEE Engineering Society, Association for Information Systems, INFORMS) at various conferences (ICIS, HICSS, CSWIM) and has many times been a keynote speaker in academic and industry research and technology innovation events. 

He also has served as Editor in Chief of Elsevier’s journal, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, where he grew the annual number of submissions from ~150 to ~750 over a ten-year period, which finished as of early 2020. His term went from 2009-2020. He also served as Policy Committee Chair for MIS Quarterly at the University of Minnesota in the early 2000s and has been a frequent Guest Editor and contributor of many special issues at various journals. He also co-authored the 50th anniversary research commentary article on the IS discipline for Management Science in the mid-1990s. He is currently working to complete a new book on ‘The Cashless Society’ (MIT Press).