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Project owners are important. They shall support the project manager and provide senior backing to a project. However, there are some different aspects of project ownership, which are discussed in this paper. The main research questions addressed in the paper are; how is the project owner role described in the literature, and how is the role in practice? The paper is mainly a theory review of the topic project ownership. We present a simple model for the relation between project owner, project manager and operation of the project delivery. The basis for the model and discussion is a theoretical review, but we also test the proposed model on a sample of projects. As we will see, this testing creates the need for a distinction between two types of project owners; one that is mainly concerned with supporting the project manager and enabling project delivery, the other being focused on the business case and having responsibility for both project delivery and benefit realization. There has been a development where the importance of the role as project owner has been highlighted. It is our impression that this development has had two ambitions. One is to strengthen project execution. The other ambition is to emphasize the business case perspective. These two perspectives call for different organizational positions of the persons called project owners. We urge future researchers and practitioners to clarify what type of project owner role that is referred to in different contexts. We also call for an awareness of the fact that different project owners will have different set of incentives and priorities. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

There is a growing emphasis on digital transformation in research and business practice. The creation of value from IT-investments is a critical factor in digital transformation. Research has documented that the ability to realize IT-value is a very challenging endeavor, especially for small enterprises who because of resource poverty are dependent on external input and cooperation with other companies. There is a general lack of research on the phenomenon of how IT-value is co-created, particularly in small firms. This paper reports from a study of a cluster of performing arts organizations, Blender Collective. They realized that audience data is a key issue, and that they lack the tools to work strategically with audiences. Blender Collective members therefore engaged in a project to develop a collaborative approach towards strategic audience development. The results expand our understanding of the dynamics related to co-creation in a cluster of small businesses. We find that co-creation can be an important avenue for small enterprises to invest in IT and realize IT-value. We propose a modified IT-value framework to explain how networks of small enterprises would co-create IT-value.