About me

PD Dr.-Ing. habil. rer. pol. Sven-Volker Rehm is an independent researcher with more than 25 years of academic and applied research experience at the intersection of technology, communication, and organizing. He is the Founding Director of the Collective and Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (CAIR Institute), a distributed, virtual research-as-a-service initiative currently in its founding phase.

Since 1999, Dr. Rehm has acquired and led numerous interdisciplinary, European-scale research projects in close collaboration with industry and public organizations, primarily in the fields of innovation management, digital transformation, and socio-technical systems design. These projects have collectively exceeded €30 million in third-party funding. He is currently affiliated with the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and has previously held academic appointments at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Stuttgart, and the Technical University of Munich.

His research focuses on collective intelligence and artificial intelligence, examining how meaning, coordination, and decision-making emerge in hybrid collectives such as teams, organizations, and business ecosystems. Dr. Rehm is Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Collective Intelligence Perspectives and serves on the Editorial Board of MIS Quarterly Executive. His work has been published in leading journals including Information & Management, Information and Organization, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, and Smart Cities, among others.

Dr. Rehm holds a five-year Diploma in Cybernetics and Information Science and a Ph.D. in Business Informatics from the University of Stuttgart. In 2014, he received his Habilitation in Business Administration from WHU. His teaching portfolio covers topics such as Management Information Systems, Digital Transformation and Innovation, Technology and Innovation Management, Future Foresight, and Systems Thinking & Managerial Cybernetics.

He has advised the European Commission as an independent expert on integrating technologies for industrial applications and regularly serves as reviewer or associate editor for leading journals and conferences, including the European Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Information Technology, Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the Academy of Management (CTO, ODC, OMT, TIM divisions), and AIS Conferences on Information Systems (AMCIS, ECIS, ICIS).

Since 2021, Dr. Rehm has served as Executive Chairman of the GWS Society for Managerial & Social Cybernetics . He is a member of the Association for Information Systems, the Academy of Management, INFORMS, and the German Informatics Society.

His work is grounded in the conviction that research should lead to tangible organizational and societal impact. Over the years, he has collaborated with numerous companies and public institutions across Europe to strengthen their capabilities in information management, innovation, and digital transformation.

His current work focuses on AI-enabled business models for digital platforms and the study of collective intelligence in teams, organizations, and business ecosystems. Central to this work is the analysis of inferential processes—how interpretations form, stabilize, and shift, how feedback dynamics shape coordination, and how decisions emerge in complex socio-technical settings. These interests are reflected in his ongoing development of research-driven analytical prototypes for exploring decision landscapes and hybrid collectives, bridging conceptual inquiry with systematic, AI-supported analysis.