My teaching interests center on blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and the governance of digital infrastructures, with a particular emphasis on bridging technical foundations with managerial and policy implications. I design and deliver undergraduate, graduate, and executive-level courses that integrate core information systems theory with hands-on exposure to emerging financial and cryptographic architectures, including smart contracts, stablecoins, tokenization, and platform governance. A defining feature of my pedagogy is research-driven teaching that connects cutting-edge academic insights, industry practice, and regulatory developments, enabling students to critically assess digital innovation in complex institutional and global contexts.
My research focuses on the institutional, organizational, and governance dimensions of blockchain and digital financial infrastructures, with particular attention to decentralized governance, stablecoins, tokenization, and digital sovereignty. I examine how novel ledger technologies reshape core economic and social institutions such as money, ownership, trust, and regulation and use a combination of design science, qualitative field studies, policy analysis, and theory development grounded in institutional theory and information systems research. A central objective of my work is to generate theoretically rigorous and policy-relevant insights that inform the design, regulation, and societal impact of next-generation financial and digital infrastructures.
My advisory and professional interests lie at the intersection of academic research, industry innovation, and public policy in the domains of blockchain, digital assets, financial market infrastructures, and digital governance. I advise startups, financial institutions, technology providers, and public organizations on blockchain architecture, governance models, regulatory strategy, and digital-sovereignty initiatives, and I actively collaborate with international policy bodies, standardization committees, and regulatory sandboxes in Europe and the United States. Through these engagements, I seek to translate scholarly insights into practice while feeding real-world challenges back into research, teaching, and institutional capacity building.
Roman Beck is Professor and Chester B. Slade Endowed Chair of Information Systems at Bentley University, where he directs the Crypto Ledger Lab. He is internationally recognized for pioneering research and policy leadership on blockchain governance. Before joining Bentley, he founded and led the European Blockchain Center at the IT University of Copenhagen, establishing one of Europe’s foremost academic hubs for blockchain and distributed-ledger research. He has co-founded and advises several ventures focused on decentralized cloud computing, payment systems, misinformation prevention, and post-quantum cryptographic protocols. He also serves as Guest Professor at Halmstad University in Sweden since 2024 and was Affiliated Professor at the University of the Faroe Islands in 2024 and 2025. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from West University of Timișoara, Romania, recognizing his groundbreaking contributions to blockchain research and was named AIS Fellow in 2025.
A long-standing AIS member and editorial leader, Dr. Beck has made enduring contributions to the IS field through scholarship, community service, and global policy engagement. His research has appeared in leading journals including Academy of Management Review, MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Business & Information Systems Engineering. His work integrates institutional theory, economics, and digital governance to explain how decentralized infrastructures transform coordination, accountability, and value creation across organizations and societies.
Dr. Beck has served the global IS community in multiple leadership roles, including AIS Council Member representing Region 2, ECIS 2025 Honorary Conference Chair (Amman), ICIS 2022 Co-Chair (Copenhagen), and ECIS 2022 Co-Chair (Timișoara). As Senior Editor for JAIS (Policy & Impact), Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly Executive, and former Department Editor for Business & Information Systems Engineering, he has advanced the vision of an IS field that bridges scholarly rigor with policy relevance.
His policy and impact work spans international organizations and governments. He served as Convenor of ISO TC 307 Working Group 5 on Blockchain Governance, leading development of the first international blockchain governance standard, and represented Denmark for seven years in the EU Blockchain Partnership. He co-convened the European Ethical Guidelines for Blockchain Systems for the European Commission and has advised OECD, UNECE, national governments, and central banks. In 2025, he co-authored a whitepaper on decentralized identity management for the United Nations. As co-founder of the European Decentralization Institute, he continues to champion ethical value creation in decentralized infrastructures. He is also editor of the forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, and DLT (2026).