Roman Beck

Curriculum

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Roman Beck is a Full Professor at the Business IT Department and Head of the European Blockchain Center at ITU (www.ebcc.eu), Affiliated Professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of the Faroe Islands, as well as Guest Professor at Halmstad University, Sweden. According to the German newspaper Wirtschaftswoche, Roman is among the top 2% of all German professors in business administration in terms of research output. He is also ranked among the top 1% of all information systems researchers in the world. As a blockchain economist, his research focuses on the changing nature of institutions due to blockchain with a focus on governance and value creation and capturing in decentralized systems.

Peer-reviewed publications

Dr. Beck has published over 200 mostly peer-reviewed academic publications which have been cited around 8,300 times. According to Google Scholar, this equates to an h-index of 35 and an i10-index of 93. His research has been awarded with several best paper awards. He is serving as Senior Editor of both the Journal of Association for Information Systems (JAIS) and Management Information Systems Quarterly Executive (MISQE), as well as a Department Editor at the Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) journal. His most impactful research in the last 5 years:

• The research published by Beck et al. (2018) laid the foundations for the ISO standard TS 23635:2022 “Blockchain and distributed ledger technology – Guidelines for governance”, where this publication is cited.
• The research in Beck et al. (2023) influenced the regulatory guidance on how to design Carbon Removal Certificate tokens for the EU Commission, DG CLIMA, to meet the Paris Agreement.
• The research on ethical implications of blockchain systems published by Agerskov et al. (2023) has been used by the Expert Group on Blockchain Ethics (EGBE) of which Roman Beck served as convenor on behalf of the European Blockchain Partnership. The EGBE has published the first official EU ethical guidelines for blockchain systems.

International impact & acknowledgements

• Roman is the Ministry-appointed representative of Denmark at the European Blockchain Partnership Technical Working Group at the EU Commission in Brussels. He also serves as Convenor of the EU Expert Group on Blockchain Ethics, responsible for defining ethical guidelines for blockchain systems. 
• Roman has been the Ministry-appointed representative of Denmark at UNECE working as convenor on Blockchain interoperability recommendations, as well as the Ministry-appointed representative if Denmark at the OECD Blockchain Policy Advisory Board.
• He is the Head of the Danish ISO TC 307 Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technology standardization group and served as convenor of ISO TC 307 WG5 Blockchain Governance standardization.
• For his work at ISO as convenor of the Blockchain Governance standard, Roman was awarded with the 2022 Impact Award of the Association of Information Systems.
• For his academic trailblazing work on blockchain in Information Systems research, he received a doctorate honoris causa from West University Timisoara in 2023.
• Roman served as Vice-President AIS Region 2 for two years, was co-conference chair for the two leading conferences in information systems, ECIS 2022 and ICIS 2022, and serves as honorary conference chair for ECIS 2025.

Teaching experience

In total, Dr. Beck has taught more than 1,000 PhD and master students in Blockchain Economics since 2016. As supervisor, he successfully coached 19 PhD students, with currently one PhD student he is co-supervising at the Faroes Islands. Some of his former PhD students hold professor positions at the University of Miami, ESSEC Business School Paris, or the University of Queensland.

He established the Blockchain Summer School (www.blockchainschool.eu) which was held for the first time in 2016. Roman has co-authored blockchain cases with two of them published at Harvard Business School and one at MISQE.

Academic background

As a visiting scholar, he spent three months at CRITO, University of California at Irvine in 2003 and further two months at the School of Information, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2004. In 2008, he was visiting professor at the CIS Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University at Atlanta for three months and spent another two months at NYU Stern in 2010. During his research sabbatical in 2012, he was a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra for three months.

Professional experience