Donald Ropes is Professor of Learning and Development in Organisations at Inholland University of Applied Sciences. His research is on learning in complex environments, specifically how we can help people and organisations to become responsive: able to absorb shocks, adapt and thrive in new situations and look for challenges that can be turned into opportunities. For more than ten years, Professor Ropes has been working on advancing Design Science Research as a way to contribute to organisations' development while at the same time expanding organisational learning theory.

The point of this talk is to explain the Design Science Research approach as a way to bridge the rigor-relevance gap present in much of scientific work. In the presentation I discuss how explanatory sciences such as Sociology or Physics are mono-disciplinary in nature and aim to produce outcomes that contribute to the body of knowledge specific to that discipline. In these fields methodological rigor is crucial in order to support the knowledge claims generated. However, this means limiting the research to perhaps just one variable while eliminating any influence of the research context. Thus, assuring rigor generally means sacrificing practical relevance. Design Science Research, on the other hand, is a multidisciplinary approach aimed at generating actionable knowledge - that which is both rigorous and relevant for practice.