ABSTRACT
Overview of Design Science Research Research Drawing heavily from Kuhn (1996; first published in 1962) and Lakatos (1978), research can be very generally defined as an activity that contributes to the understanding of a phenomenon. In the case of design science research, all or part of the phenomenon may be created as opposed to naturally occurring. The phenomenon is typically a set of behaviors of some entity(ies) that is found interesting by the researcher or by a group — a research community. Understanding in most Western research communities is knowledge that allows prediction of the behavior of some aspect of
to the production of understanding (knowledge) constitutes its research methods or techniques. Historically, some research communities have been observed to have nearly universal agreement on the phenomenon of interest and the research methods for investigating it; in this book we term these “paradigmatic” communities. Other research communities are bound into a nominal community by overlap in sets of phenomena of interest or overlap in methods of investigation. We term these “pre-paradigmatic” or “multi-paradigmatic” research communities. As of the writing of this book, information systems provides an excellent example of a multiparadigmatic community.
