Piloting IT-Innovations: a German approach to researching IT-Innovations incomplex real-world social settings

Researching the design and usage of complex socio-technical systems as for instancevirtual communities is especially challenging. Such research subject can often hardly bereduced for meaningful study. Virtual communities, consisting of a (social) context thatinteracts with information technologies, can best be understood as whole entities. In orderto develop an understanding of the interaction of complex social entities and theirinformation systems we introduce the research approach of piloting IT-Innovations, avariation of action research.[...]