An Introduction to GIRI 2.0 

The Global Interaction Research Initiative (GIRI2.0) is a 5-year research and research-based teaching initiative, where the object of study is global interaction based on globally interdisciplinary collaboration. Our approach to Global Interaction is multifaceted, including a varied participation consisting of a wide span of research fields from science, liberal art and business, extending to a global network of universities, organizations, and companies.The initiative was formed as part of the IT University of Copenhagen's globalization strategy, aiming at preparing students, faculty, and society to tackle globally interactive processes.  

GIRI2.0 Vision              

1) Inspire and challenge each other’s research on global interaction in an interdisciplinary environment.

2) Have an international high-ranking research profile in global interaction.

3) Ground our research-based teaching in our research on global interaction.

4) Provide our students with a global interaction brand. 

5) Communicate and collaborate on global interaction with the Danish industrial organizations  as well as global companies.  

Organizational structure

The Initiative consists of activity-based planning and budgetting, dynamic interdisciplinary collaborative and decision-making and has no appointed leader. The activities all have appointed researchers (one or more), who are responsible of ensuring planning, execution and reporting. The dynamics of the GIRI2.0 organization is comprised of a GIRI2.0 Steering group of five faculties: Pernille Bjørn, Yvonne Dittrich, Thomas Pederson, Kjell Yngve Petersen, and Irina Shklovski. Each year, a different steering group participant takes on the position of GIRI2.0 Coordinator and thereby the responsibility for coordination. The structure ensures flexibility and shared commitment across the different faculty groups at ITU and thus supports the interdisciplinary focus of GIRI2.0. The current GIRI2.0 coordinator is Associate Professor Pernille Bjørn, and if you want to know more about GIRI2.0 and how it might be interesting for you or your organizations, please do contact pbra@itu.dk .  

What do we mean by Global Interaction?

We define global interaction as the situations where people interact together towards a shared endeavor and the context includes one or more globally embedded discontinuities affecting the collaborative situation. Global discontinuities might be related to differences in geography, time, national culture, organizational culture, work practices, professional disciplines, technologies, and languages. When people interact together in collaborative engagement the global element becomes pertinent when one or more discontinuities arises – and it is exactly these situations where complexities emerge and new approaches, strategies, and theoretical conceptualizations are required. Our join aim is to address global interaction situations and investigate how people can interact globally despite embedded discontinuities – and in this work identify the role of information technology. This is the type of global interaction we want to pursue in GIRI 2.0.