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HKU Professor Patrick YK Chau won "The Best Conference Paper Award" at the 9th Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems

16 Aug 2005

Professor Patrick YK Chau, Professor of Information Systems of The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has brought home "The Best Conference Paper Award" at the Ninth Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) 2005 which was held in Bangkok in early July. It is the first time ever for an author from Hong Kong to receive this award.

Professor Patrick Y K Chau, Professor of the School of Business, FBE, together with his doctoral student Aman Cheung and research assistant Anson Au, co-authored the award winning paper.Entitled "Does Knowledge Reuse Make a Creative Person More Creative?", their paper stood out from the total 300 submissions by information systems (IS) scholars/researchers from more than 20 countries.

Out of those 300 submissions, eight papers were short-listed as best paper candidates based on comments and recommendations of paper reviewers. Professor Chau's paper was rated the best by the Best Paper Selection Panel which consisted of six senior IS scholars worldwide, including representatives from USA, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.

Looking into the effect of the most common type of organisational knowledge management system, that is, an intranet-based knowledge repository, the paper provided insight into the level of creative performance of an individual.

Professor Chau's team conducted a controlled experiment on more than a hundred individuals to investigate the quantitative and qualitative levels of creativity outcomes on an open-ended business task. Subjects' levels of baseline creativity skills were also measured in order to inspect its interaction with knowledge reuse.

Results of the experiment suggest that while knowledge reuse resulting from this repository type of knowledge management system may help an individual generate more creative ideas (i.e., quantity-wise), its use, however, may inhibit the level of creativity of the individual (i.e., quality-wise). In particular, this inhibiting effect is significantly stronger on an individual with a higher baseline creativity skill than those with a lower level of skill, making a creative person performs less creative than an otherwise unimaginative person.

PACIS is one of the top conferences in the field of information-related technologies and practices and the top conference in the Asia-Pacific Region. It is one of the three affiliated conferences of Association for Information Systems (AIS). AIS is the most premier academic association in the field of Information Systems, with total members of more than 4,500 worldwide.

For interviews or enquiries, please contact Miss Cherry Cheung, Senior Press Officer of HKU, Tel: 2589 2606 or Email: cherry.cheung@hku.hk

August 16, 2005