Addressing Grand Challenges

As a scientific community, we regularly discuss future research topics and the development of our field. BISE special issue 1/2014 was based on a broad call for papers asking our community where we see key research areas with a high relevance and research potential for the upcoming years. In addition, we deem it important to look at research in our community with a long-term perspective and to ask ourselves which topics our community should focus on, even if these are new fields of research. Such long-term research goals are often called grand challenges. The term grand challenges was coined in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of important unsolved problems that inspired researchers and encouraged innovation in mathematics research ever since. Different communities have picked up the idea and formulated their set of grand challenges – among them natural sciences or medicine and, more recently, computer science and management. The underlying idea of grand challenges is to focus on ambitious research objectives that harness science, technology, and innovation to solve important national or global problems, and that have the potential to capture the public’s imagination (U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy 2014). Consequently, grand challenges not only aim at inspiring researchers, but also play an increasingly important role for allocating public and private research funds. In this issue of BISE, two groups of authors have independently of each other taken on the initiative of identifying grand challenges in BISE by conducting surveys and Delphi studies among scholars. The research notes in this issue summarize the results of these initiatives and outline future research opportunities for BISE researchers. Obviously, it is not an easy task to identify grand challenges in general and, more specifically, in a heterogeneous discipline such as BISE. Both research notes come up with a long list of research challenges, which may provide an important impetus in a discourse that we want to continue in this discussion section of BISE and beyond.