Department of Management Sciences
Institute for Digital Consumption (IVI)
Goals and tasks
The IVI communicates and researches approaches to promote digital sovereignty, consumer protection and sustainability in connection with the digitalisation of consumer worlds. Concepts and methods of consumer sciences and business informatics are applied.
The institute's goal is to bring together the often fragmented research work of different disciplines in teaching, to promote the national and international visibility of the topic and, in particular, to further anchor the topic of IT security management in university teaching.
Fields of research and application
Digital Consumption is a sub-discipline of consumer science and the neighbouring field of business informatics. It examines the increasing digitalisation of consumer fields and its effects on the consumption practices of consumers.
In order to identify their wishes and behavioural strategies and to be able to derive adequate recommendations regarding the design of products and services, the perspective of private households is explicitly taken into account. Thus, consumer and data protection, the sovereign use of digital products and services as well as sustainability through improved consumer information are to be promoted. These cross-sectional topics are thus an integral part of all research fields in digital consumption.
Central fields of research
- Mobility approaches and multimodal transport concepts
- Digital trends around nutrition and health
- Smart Home and household digitalisation
- Precautionary financial management
- Shopping and procurement
Consumer informatics/digital consumption thus combines technical approaches of computer science (such as consumer analytics and information systems) with theories of consumption and concepts of consumer sciences (such as theories of practice and digital market mechanisms).
