Find out more about our main research projects
The KIN Center for Digital Innovation is working on different large funded research projects. We often do this in collaboration with our business partners.
Find out more about our main research projects below.
Grid congestion is becoming a critical bottleneck for the energy transition, as renewable generation, electrification, and data centers increasingly exceed the capacity of existing electricity grids. Because expanding infrastructure is costly and slow, congestion relief depends on innovation in flexibility and storage (e.g., demand response, batteries, digitally coordinated flexibility markets). These solutions require coordinated innovation efforts among interdependent actors—grid operators, technology providers, aggregators, and users—within electricity systems designed for central control and reliability.
Dr. Lukas Falcke was awarded NWO Veni grant to study how different organizations—grid operators, technology providers, markets, and users—work together like an “innovation ecosystem” to test and adopt new solutions such as energy storage and flexible electricity demand. By following real pilot projects in the Netherlands and across Europe, the research explains how coordinated actions succeed or fail, offering lessons to speed up practical solutions for a reliable and cleaner energy system.
The project leverages research partnerships with the TSO Innovation Alliance and the facilitator of TenneT’s Open Innovation program and develops a process-based theory of ecosystem orchestration, explaining how actors align real-time operations, short-term experimentation, and long-term grid planning; and how congestion solutions travel, adapt, or stall when extending across interconnected European electricity systems.
The project aims to advance ecosystem theory while generating actionable knowledge for organizations responsible for operating, innovating, and governing electricity systems. It will produce empirically grounded guidance to support effective experimentation and scaling of congestion solutions in the Netherlands and across Europe.
With the rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Harvey, and Co-pilot, new ways of generating knowledge have entered work, organizations and society. This has sparked popular discourses, with some expressing the fear of technology taking over occupations and others touting promises of increased productivity and creative possibilities. While GenAI’s radical capabilities might indeed justify such hopes and anxieties, the GenAI@Work project will focus on its more profound, indirect, and longer-term implications at the workplace.
Prof. dr. Marleen Huysman was awarded NWO grant to explore the transformations that GenAI brings to the work of professionals and organizations, as well as the consequences for organizational social structures.
GenAI@Work consists of three research projects. One PhD project will explore how GenAI tools change knowledge creation, sharing, and validation and how these changes impact social structures within the workplace. Another PhD project will study how GenAI tools transform knowledge integration within and beyond organizations, and their effects on organizational structures and policies. The third project is a collaborative effort involving researchers from the AI@Work research group — prof. dr. Marleen Huysman, dr. Reza Mousavi Baygi, dr. Ella Hafermalz, dr. Anne-Sophie Mayer and dr. Wendy Günther. These researchers will explore eight organizations that are already using GenAI across various industries. Based on their findings, the team will develop practical guidelines for the responsible development, use, and management of GenAI at work.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the economy, society, and higher education, creating an urgent need for graduates who can develop AI solutions that address real human needs. While design thinking is an established method for user-centered innovation, its systematic application to AI remains largely absent from university curricula. Instructors who wish to integrate human-centered AI innovation into their teaching often lack the structured materials and methodological guidance to do so efficiently, which limits the speed at which proven teaching approaches can spread across institutions.
Dr. Edona Elshan and Prof. Dr. Bart van den Hooff together with colleagues from four universities across Europe, has received an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership grant for the project Design Thinking for Artificial Intelligence (DT4AI). The project will turn a proven, practice-based teaching format into a fully modular, digital program that enables university educators to integrate human-centered AI innovation into their courses.
The project builds on eight semesters of DT4AI courses at the Universities of St. Gallen and Liechtenstein, comprising 40 real-world projects and approximately 240 students. Drawing on this experience, the consortium will benchmark more than 15 master's-level innovation courses, develop over 30 modular teaching units, three to four industry case studies in manufacturing, finance, and healthcare, and 30 short instructional videos, and pilot these materials with more than 40 educators across four institutions to ensure usability and curriculum fit. Alongside student materials, the program provides educators with methods and resources for designing and conducting AI-focused innovation projects responsibly and competently. DT4AI is a collaboration between the University of Liechtenstein (coordination, manual and material design), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with dr. Emma Han-Ju Yang wi(piloting, human–AI interaction, low-code integration), Aalto University (pedagogical design, video production, case study development), the University of Münster (ERCIS) (design science research, network outreach), and Bern University of Applied Sciences (associate partner, scaling design thinking curricula, software engineering). At VU, At VU, the team also includes Dr. Han-Ju (Emma) Yang, who leads the piloting of the courses.
The project aims to strengthen capabilities for human-centered AI innovation in higher education across Europe. Upon completion, a publicly accessible DT4AI platform will be available to university lecturers and students, complemented by white papers, conference presentations, Innovation Breakfasts, and KINTalks that will foster a pan-European community of practice. Through these educators, DT4AI seeks to prepare a new generation of T-shaped professionals to contribute to sustainable, human-centered digital transformation and to strengthen the exchange between higher education and practice.
Algorithms can enable efficient and effective medical diagnoses for patients. However, several challenges can hinder the development and adoption of algorithmic technologies in day-to-day clinical practice. These challenges include a lack of shared understanding among stakeholders, unknown biases in existing data sources, insufficient domain knowledge, difficulties in interpreting results, and limited user acceptance. To tackle these challenges, novel use-cases of AI in clinical workflow must be collectively designed, tested, and evaluated for and before implementing them in practice.
The NWO-funded research project led by dr. Mohammad Rezazade Mehrizi, will investigate how novel algorithmic technologies can be applied in medical diagnosis through collaborative learning among medical professionals, technology communities, policymakers, and patient groups. The main goal of the project is to facilitate the effective co-creation and implementation of AI while creating a “learning community” where all relevant stakeholders can collaboratively experiment with and learn from specific use cases. The project also aims to identify novel skills and areas of knowledge required for successful AI implementation and design of educational programs to support the future workforce.
The team includes dr. Wendy Günther (KIN Center for Digital Innovation), PhD candidate Ferdinand Mol (KIN Center for Digital Innovation), dr. Willem Grootjans (Leiden University Medical Center, LUMC), dr. Mark van Buchem (LUMC), dr. Harmen Bijwaard (Hogeschool Inholland) and several partners: CMRAD, Contextflow, Oxipit, Nederlandse Vereniging Medische Beeldvorming en Radiotherapie, Nederlandse Vereniging voor Radiologie, Longkanker Nederland (patient community).
The grant is part of the Knowledge and Innovation covenant (KIC) 2020-2023 of the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Check the project website: https://www.liaison.social/
The energy and circularity transitions must be accelerated to achieve our national climate ambitions. To develop and adopt long-term integrated solutions for a sustainable future, a joint effort is required from industry partners, knowledge and educational institutes, and governmental organizations: all parties together need to create a shared plan for significant change in our ecosystems. The concept of learning communities is a promising way to support interorganizational learning and innovation and to envision and implement the necessary changes. However, while many learning communities have been formed in the context of energy and circularity transitions, we still lack fundamental knowledge about how they can best facilitate ongoing learning and innovation.
'Power Up!' brings together a consortium of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Twente, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, and governmental organisations in 18 learning communities. Prof. Dr. Maaike Endedijk, a specialist in Educational Sciences at the University of Twente, will lead the project, with a primary focus on integrating learning, working and innovation during societal transitions. prof dr. ir. Fleur Deken and dr. Lukas Andreas Falcke will be responsible for one of the three work packages that make up the project. Work Package 2 explores how learning communities can work together to create a shared pathway for ecosystem change, helping to strengthen and maintain the commitment of all member organizations. Additionally, it looks at how these communities and their members can identify specific socio-technical challenges based on their vision for the ecosystem, which innovation teams can then solve.
The project will result in a Power Up Toolkit — to guide learning communities in making informed choices on how they can support and monitor their interorganizational learning and innovation processes to accelerate the energy and circularity transitions.
Over the past decades, many organizations have answered calls to collectively develop innovative solutions for societal challenges (e.g., the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal-17 ‘Partnerships’). Mission-oriented innovation (MOI) relies heavily on collaboration among diverse organizations. While this diversity can provide valuable knowledge and resources for developing innovative solutions, it can also create challenges. Traditional collaboration approaches can hinder the progress of MOI development.
This project, led by prof. dr. ir. Fleur Deken aims to integrate disparate theories and insights from strategic management, innovation studies, and organization theory to create innovative, multi-level theory on the development of collaborative capabilities and routines that support collective MOI development.
Through comparative process research, the project will develop detailed frameworks identifying which collaborative capabilities are effective for MOI and how these capabilities vary across different types of collaborations, organizations, and solutions. It will also examine how collaborative capabilities and routines are cultivated and embedded within organizations. A sample of five leading organizations with extensive MOI experience has been selected to provide valuable case studies, helping to develop new theories on capability development amidst the complexities of MOI and the diverse goals of their partners. Ultimately, this research will offer crucial insights into how organizations can enhance their collaborative capabilities for MOI, contributing to the advancement of scientific and policy agendas for MOI more broadly.
Prof. dr. Ir. Hans Berends, head of the KIN Center of Digital Innovations, was awarded a grant for the OPEN-QUAL project. Together with his team members, prof. dr. ir. Fleur Deken, dr. Philipp Tuertscher, dr. Katharina Cepa, dr. Lukas Falcke and Ph.D. candidate Eric Haynes, he hopes to gain new insights into the reuse of existing qualitative data from other researchers and thereby realizing open science principles in qualitative research— where this has been very difficult until now.
Qualitative data are particularly versatile and therefore uniquely suited for reuse, however, privacy restrictions and barriers to anomyzation prevented researchers from doing so. Limited reuse wastes the valuable resources invested in the research and stymies valuable opportunities for knowledge creation and accumulation.
The approach developed in OPEN-QUAL focuses on the decentralized reuse of data, without sharing raw data. Original researchers maintain sovereignty over their data, yet reuse them for new research questions, guided by a shared analytical protocol. OPEN-QUAL will yield fundamental new insight into collaborative knowledge production to enable knowledge accumulation in the field of management research.
The work on the OPEN-QUAL project includes developing a platform that facilitates the discovery of relevant datasets and ensures that insights are disseminated beyond the duration of this project. This will spur qualitative researchers to reuse their data to enable progress on the open science agenda in the field of qualitative management research.
KIN researchers, including prof. dr. Ir. Hans Berends, prof. dr. Ir. Fleur Deken and Ph.D. candidate Hanna Fults, are collaborating with other researchers and stakeholders on an NWO KIC project to develop knowledge on scaling and accelerating innovation through fieldlabs.
Fieldlabs are emerging as a promising approach to mission-driven innovation. They bring together regional stakeholders — including business and knowledge institutes — to collaboratively experiment with solutions for societal challenges. Their effectiveness remains mixed as they face problems in scaling such innovative solutions in business ecosystems. Involving a broad, interdisciplinary consortium, Fieldlabs@Scale studies fieldlabs in agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, and smart industry.
The project develops new theories on mechanisms for collaborative experimentation and aims to co-create a toolkit, as well as Fieldlab Academy, alongside policymakers, regional network organizations, and fieldlab participants.
The research offers insights into the intermediate steps needed to move from innovation to societal impact and earning power and facilitates support for fieldlabs in accelerating mission-driven innovation and generating economic and societal value.
dr. Tamara Thuis and dr. Maria Carmen Punzi closely engage and collaborate with partners to translate research insights into practical guidelines for responsible AI development and the use of period and fertility tracing technologies.
The “FemTech” industry was valued at $55 billion globally in 2024 and continues to grow: more than 50 million women currently use apps for menstruation and fertility tracking. The use of algorithms—particularly AI—in these technologies is increasing. These apps offer users personalized predictions, information, and advice about menstruation, ovulation, and fertility. Women are increasingly relying on these (AI-driven) technologies to understand menstrual symptoms and make health-related decisions. With the rise of Generative AI, women are also increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT for advice about their menstrual health.
In the "Responsible Design and Use of AI-Driven Period and Fertility Tracking Technologies" Tamara Thuis and Maria Carmen Punzi explore the broader ethical implications of AI algorithms in period and fertility tracking apps— including the responsibilities of the organizations developing these tools and what responsible design and use could look like.
The Netherlands is currently behind on its climate targets due to a slow and insufficient renovation process.The RenoDat project addresses some of the most pressing challenges in the Dutch construction and housing sectors by facilitating the large-scale adoption of the Renovation Passport, which is critical to achieving decarbonization of the built environment and meeting the Netherlands’ climate goals.
RenoDat aims to support the implementation of the Renovation Passport by addressing knowledge gaps around data governance, ownership, privacy, and harmonization through a transdisciplinary approach that brings together a national consortium of universities, applied sciences, public authorities and companies. Prof. dr. Philipp Tuertscher and dr. Katharina Cepa are responsible for one of the seven work packages within the project. Their focus is on the collaborative adoption of these passports: how homeowners, municipalities, contractors, and platforms build trust, share data, and actually use this information in renovation decisions.
The project aims to deliver lasting societal and economic impacts, both during its implementation and long after completion, by increasing homeowners’ engagement with data-driven renovation, standardizing digital tools, and developing training modules to professionalize volunteers, as well as developing financial models to support renovation incentives.
Households and small businesses already generate a lot of energy data but they have limited control over how the data are used and by whom. This is usually used and controlled by third parties while the residents have limited possibilities to use the data collectively (within energy communities). The MEENT project is looking to answer how energy communities can be empowered to share, govern, and use energy data together on their own terms.
In the MEENT project prof. dr. Philipp Tuertscher, dr. Lukas Falcke, and dr. Damla Diriker explore how local energy communities can govern and use their own energy data through an Energy Data Commons. In partnership with public actors and two energy communities in Amsterdam, they look at how residents and SMEs experience data sharing, what they expect in terms of fairness, privacy and control, and how digital tools can help them collectively align energy use with renewable supply.
The work on the the MEENT project includes developing a playbook that supports small and medium-sized users in jointly creating Energy Data Commons; a digital library with a conceptual governance structure and templates for organizational plans and legal contracts, enabling energy community members to manage, share, and use data collaboratively; an application framework; and a data platform that can be adopted by other energy communities.
Professional service robots aim to serve as partners in teams and are employed in unstructured work environments. Rigorous academic knowledge is thus needed to understand how robots are used in practice and with what consequence for work. Such knowledge can generate a productive dialogue between engineering science and organization science, creating synergy between traditionally disconnected fields and ensuring that robots support rather than undermine people's work lives.
Prof. dr. Anastasia Sergeeva works on a Vidi grant by NWO to explain how work is changing when robots are entering work settings to serve as partners of humans. Together with her team, Ph.D. candidate Melissa Sexton and prof. dr. Anastasia Sergeeva will conduct several ethnographic studies of professional service robots at work to develop novel methods and approaches to recognize the embeddedness of the robot into work teams, as well as richness, unruliness, and institutional nature of work domains.
The project aims to develop actionable principles for the design and development of robots, as well as guidelines for managers that are planning to introduce robots to a workspace.
The KIN Center for Digital Innovation and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) have embarked on a dynamic partnership facilitated by the I-Partnerschap, a Dutch government entity dedicated to fostering collaboration between government agencies and higher education institutions on digitization-related themes.
This particular collaboration is centred around a groundbreaking project focusing on the renewal of the IT and process landscape of the IND. The IND maintains a commitment to preserving a harmonious balance between foundational structures and innovation, which involves ensuring consistent alignment between business and IT during the transition process. The project, under the supervision of prof. dr. Bart van den Hooff, promises to advance our knowledge of the challenges encountered in such renewal initiatives, and how to address them.
The partnership between KIN, IND and I-Partnerschap creates a unique synergy between research and organisations in practice and facilitates knowledge transfer from academia to industry. The project , promises to advance our knowledge of the challenges encountered in such renewal projects, and how to deal with these.
To reduce resource consumption and increase operations’ reliability, organizations deploy digital technologies to monitor, control, optimize, and automate existing physical operations (e.g. sensors in factories for efficient production, maintenance, and IoT services). This process often requires an implementation of digital-physical products and services, where the digital-layer acts as a ‘portal’ to connect organizations across industries (hardware/engineering, software/IT).
It is unknown how digital data enable these connections and how this shapes competitive dynamics for organizations with different origins, sizes, and structures. dr. Katharina Cepa, a researcher from the KIN Center for Digital Innovations, received a grant to explain how digital data allow organizations to devise digital-physical offerings that straddle multiple industries and what the consequences of this are.
Based on interviews, observations, and archival materials in two digitalizing ecosystems that tackle this twin digital/green transition, this research answers the question: how does the digital data layer of digital-physical offerings allow organizations to enter and traverse industries, and what are the organizational and strategic implications?
This project is funded by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The programme aims to enhance the creative and innovative potential of researchers holding a Ph.D., who wish to acquire new skills through advanced training, international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility.
Prof. dr. Marleen Huysman was awarded a prestigious national grant from the NWO’s Open Competition. The research follows AI from development in the lab to its use on the work floor, to develop a collaborative methodology for augmenting knowledge work.
Currently, AI applications that are intended for use in knowledge work can be developed without input from experts in that domain (e.g. HR or healthcare). This is very different from early forms of AI, also known as expert systems, which depended on experts willingly helping them to become ‘smart’. Now that AI instead relies on large training data sets, the domain expert is often cut out altogether. The (unintended) consequences of leaving experts out of the loop of AI development are unknown. Besides prof. dr. Marleen Huysman, the research team consists of KIN Researchers dr. Ella Hafermalz and dr. Anastasia Sergeeva.
Together with 2 new PhDs and a Postdoc, they will work together to study AI development as well as its use in organizational contexts close up, over four years. The team will ultimately create a “Collaborative Methodology”, designed in close collaboration with practitioners who are involved in AI development and AI use. The Collaborative Methodology will facilitate interaction between experts before AI applications hit the ground in organizations.
Online labour platforms were on the rise, matching workers with clients through digital applications. While platform work grew rapidly, it remained unclear which laws and regulations applied to platforms and their workers. This was particularly concerning given issues such as low wages, excessive working hours, and insufficient worker protection. In addition, the data-driven surveillance capabilities of platforms raised new questions about privacy, non-discrimination, and cybersecurity.
The Platform-R project aimed to generate both theoretical and empirical insights into platform work and its governance. The project developed regulatory options for the Dutch government, grounded in key public values such as decent work, social protection, non-discrimination, privacy, and cybersecurity.
Prof. dr. ir. Hans Berends led the work package “Advocacy Strategies of Online Labour Platforms.” Together with dr. Mark Boons and prof. dr. Koen Frenken, he developed a theory explaining how online labour platforms addressed a dual strategic challenge: building a profitable business model aligned with market logic while simultaneously achieving legitimacy within their institutional environment. The research examined how legitimacy strategies differed across institutional contexts and sectors.
In the work package titled “Professional Logics and Public Values,” led by prof. dr. Koen Frenken and involving prof. dr. ir. Hans Berends and colleagues from other universities and societal stakeholders, the team investigated how professional work practices and codes of conduct could be aligned with platform business models, algorithms, and review systems. This research also generated implications for government policy and regulatory development.
It is widely recognized that to develop solutions for Grand Challenges, such as the aging population, heterogeneous parties need to collaborate. KIN Research and the Management & Organization Group from Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology worked together to research crossover collaborations for digital innovation. This project investigated such crossover collaborations for the development of health & wellbeing solutions.
A team of senior researchers, including prof. dr. Marleen Huysman (main applicant, KIN research), prof. Dr. Dirk Snelders (co-applicant, Delft University of Technology), and prof. dr. Ir. Hans Berends(KIN Research, co-applicant), as well as two PhD students and a post-doc, were investigating the collaboration practices of heterogeneous actors developing digital innovations. The first project, conducted by Natalja Laurey, investigated how heterogeneous parties can become connected in digital innovation ecosystems. The second project, led by Dr. Marina Bos-de Vos, delved into the role of creative professionals in crossover collaborations. The third project, led by Dennis van Kampen, aimed to identify how to coordinate such collaborations within successful business models.
Other senior researchers involved were Dr. Ir. Maaike Kleinsmann (Delft University of Technology), dr. Maura Soekijad (KIN Center for Digital Innovation), prof. dr. Ir. Fleur Deken (KIN Center for Digital Innovation), Prof. Dr. Gerda Gemser (RMIT University), Prof. Dr. Patrick Cohendet (Mosaic, HEC Montréal), and prof. dr. Frans Feldberg (KIN Center for Digital Innovation).
With the diverse backgrounds of team members in anthropology, design, and innovation management, they shed light on how to successfully organize crossover collaborations.
The following consortium partners took part in the research and valorization activities:
With the radical shift from an industrial to a knowledge society, knowledge workers became more significant and more autonomous. Developments in technology and society had given rise to more openness in the processes and practices of these knowledge workers. Coordinating, learning, and innovating were less constrained by organizational, geographical, and cognitive boundaries. The challenge that organizations were increasingly facing was how to combine this openness with integration across individual knowledge workers, units, and areas of expertise, and how to counter inherent threats of fragmentation.
These and related challenges were studied by prof. dr. Marleen Huysman, together with some of her colleagues from the KIN Center for Digital Innovation (dr. Marlous Agterberg, prof. dr. Ir. Hans Berendss, prof. dr. Bart van den Hooff, Dr. Philipp Tuertscher, and Maarten de Laat of the Open University of the Netherlands).
The premise of this project was that the development and utilization of employees’ human capital would require coordinating, learning, and innovating to be mutually reinforcing. PhD researchers Jochem Hummel (who defended his thesis on 5 Jun 2019) and Julia Schlegelmilch and dr. Anastasia Sergeevaa (who worked as post-docs on the project, now assistant professors at the KIN Center for Digital Innovaiton) studied how to manage human capital development across boundaries, now that new technologies increasingly broke physical, organizational, cognitive, and epistemological boundaries. They all employed in-depth case studies of organizations that were in the process of such organizational changes, or that had already made successful changes and offered alternative ‘best open practices’ from which other organizations could learn.
The researchers worked closely with a consortium of private and public partners: the Dutch tax authorities, CERN, Kentalis, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, Sparked, and VUMC.
Copyright © VU