Seminar with Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Emil Husted

INVITATION to SEMINAR

RESEARCH AND PRACTICE ON SOLVING COMPLEX SOCIETAL PROBLEMS IN DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Kirsimarja Blomqvist with Emil Husted

In this seminar, Professor Kirsimarja Blomqvist will discuss her recent and ongoing research on evolving trust requirements in knowledge collaboration and will share insights from her work on building temporary online expert communities and cross-sector teams to address complex societal challenges. Since COVID-19, she has developed the Fast Expert Teams model, initially launched with 100 experts under the mission “Prevent Finland from Paralysis.” Since then, she and her PhD students have designed and orchestrated multiple cross-sector collaborations, collecting rich data through pre-interviews, digital behavioral traces during initiatives, and post-event focus groups.

Associate Professor Emil Husten will be a provocateur of the discussion. Participants are invited to engage in reflections on and debates about research and practice on solving complex societal problems in digital platforms.   

Kirsimarja Blomqvist is a Professor for Knowledge management at the LUT Business School in Lappeenranta, Finland, and a Visiting SCANCOR-Scandinavia Fellow at CBS. Her research focuses on trust, collaborative innovation, advanced technologies, and new digital forms of organizing. It has been published e.g., in California Management Review, Creativity and Innovation Management, European Journal of Management, Information & Organization, Research Policy, R&D Management, Scandinavian Journal of Management, and Technovation. She has worked for private and public sector and serves in committees and boards. At LUT University she has founded and led its first multi-disciplinary research center, served as vice-rector, and starts as LUT board member. 

Emil Husted is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of Department at the Department of Organization, CBS. His research focuses on the organization of political parties, social movements, and activist networks. His work explores how such organizations make decisions, what holds them together, and how they are governed (e.g., through a commitment to trust). Emil is currently engaged in an ethnographic research project on the Danish Parliament as a workplace and has recently finished a Danish-language book on experiences of resonance and alienation among MPs and staff. He has also done work on digitalization and co-authored the book Digital Organizing with Ursula Plesner (the second edition will be published in 2026). 

The seminar is part of the SCANCOR-Scandinavia research seminar series