Professor Lysanne Lessard Awarded Grant from NSERC

Professor Lysanne Lessard was awarded a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for innovative research in the field of knowledge-intensive service systems.

Knowledge-intensive service activities are key components of industrialized economies, with this sector alone contributing over $80 billion to Canada’s Gross Domestic Product in 2012. A knowledge-intensive service system (KISS) is a network of organizational and technological agents that rely on knowledge as a key resource to collaboratively create knowledge-intensive outputs and outcomes that are valuable to the system’s entities. Examples include networks that form around knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) providers and open innovation initiatives.

The field currently lacks architectural frameworks that account for key characteristics of knowledge-intensive service systems (KISS) such as collaborative relationships among entities and their reliance on knowledge. Professor Lessard aims at addressing this gap by creating an Intentional Architectural Framework for the development of KISS Architectures (IAF-KISSA). This work will provide, among other applications, a formal approach for aligning functional aspects of KISS, such as resource planning, with business aspects, such as performance evaluation.