Gongtai Wang

Gongtai is a passionate researcher in Digital Innovation (Yoo, Henfridsson, and Lyytinen, 2010) specializing in qualitative methods. He is an Associate Professor at Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, United Kingdom, and an Adjunct Professor at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada. He has previously served as a Professor at Dalian University of Technology in China, an Assistant Professor at the Smith School of Business in Canada, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at UQ Business School in Australia. He also has a diverse global educational background, having earned his PhD in the United Kingdom, a Master’s degree in Systems Engineering in Japan, and a Bachelor of Management in China. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a system engineer in the IT industry.

Gongtai’s research integrates perspectives from Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation and Roberto Verganti’s design-driven innovation. His overarching research question examines how firms transform industries by creatively rethinking and strategically redesigning traditional products, services, and business models with emerging digital technologies such as the Metaverse, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. His research has been published in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and in the proceedings of leading information systems conferences. He has received two ICIS Best Short Paper awards, one at the Conference level and one at the Track level, and has had a paper nominated for the Best Paper Award at ECIS. He is also deeply committed to teaching and has developed and delivered courses on digital innovation and qualitative research methods. His dedication has been recognized with the 2023 Graduate Teaching Excellence Award from the Smith School of Business.

(Studying mixed reality-based modeling for 3D printing at Keio University in 2010)