Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

Blockchain to Rule the Waves - Nascent Design Principles for Reducing Risk and Uncertainty in Decentralized Environments

Many decentralized, inter-organizational environments such as supply chains are characterized by high transactional uncertainty and risk. At the same time, blockchain technology promises to mitigate these issues by introducing certainty into economic transactions. This paper discusses the findings of a Design Science Research project involving the construction and evaluation of an information technology artifact in collaboration with Maersk, a leading international shipping company, where central documents in shipping, such as the Bill of Lading, are turned into a smart contract on blockchain. Based on our insights from the project, we provide first evidence for preliminary design principles for applications that aim to mitigate the transactional risk and uncertainty in decentralized environments using blockchain. Both the artifact and the first evidence for emerging design principles are novel, contributing to the discourse on the implications that the advent of blockchain technology poses for governing economic activity

TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED EVALUATION OF HUMANCENTERED SERVICE SYSTEMS AND CORRESPONDING BUSINESS MODELS: A SYSTEMS THEORY PERSPECTIVE

The design of services and their corresponding business models (BMs) aims at a value creation for customers and service providers. Thus, the outcome is interrelated. However, both – the design service systems and BMs – are evaluated separately because they do not have a common theoretical foundation. Therefore, this design science research aims at the development of an evaluation scheme for the design of services and BMs. Building on a general systems theory, we conceptualize human-centered service systems (HCSSs) and their corresponding BMs as a coherent system. This conceptualization gives the possibility to provide concrete analytical levels that allow an integrated evaluation of this system. We apply this evaluation scheme in a care service context and show that the integrated evaluation allows a more concrete assessment of the combined design of HCSS and the corresponding BMs. With this evaluation scheme, we offer an operationalization of a summative evaluation for the design of HCSSs and BMs as an artifact. Also, this provides a new perspective on theory-rooted knowledge for designing and evaluating service systems. For practitioners, the evaluation results allow the coordination of the value proposition in the service systems and BMs

Demographic Transparency to Combat Data Analytics Discriminatory Recommendations

Data Analytics (DA) has been blamed for contributing to discriminatory managerial decisions in organizations. To date, most studies have focused on the technical antecedents of such discriminations. As a result, little is known about how to ameliorate the problem by focusing on the human aspects of decision making when using DA in organizational settings. This study represents an effort to address this gap. Drawing on the cognitive elaboration model of ethical decision-making, construal level theory, and the literature on moral intensity, this study investigates how the availability and the design of demographic transparency (a form of decisional guidance) can lower DA users’ likelihood of agreement with discriminatory recommendations of DA tools. In addition, this study examines the role of user’s mindfulness and organizational ethical culture on this process. This paper outlines an experimental methodology to empirically validate the proposed model and hypotheses and delineates potential contributions to theory and practice

Criteria as a Prelude for Guiding Taxonomy Evaluation

Taxonomies are design science artifacts used by researchers and practitioners to describe and classify existing or future objects of a domain. As such, they constitute a necessary foundation for theory building. Yet despite the great interest in taxonomies, there is virtually no guidance on how to rigorously evaluate them. Based on a literature review and a sample of 446 articles, this study explores the criteria currently employed in taxonomy evaluations. Surprisingly, we find that only a minority of taxonomy building projects actually evaluate their taxonomies and that there is no consistency across the multiplicity of criteria used. Our study provides a structured overview of the taxonomy evaluation criteria used by IS researchers and proposes a set of potential guidelines to support future evaluations. The purposeful and rigorous taxonomy evaluation our study advances contributes to DSR by bridging the gap between generic evaluation criteria and concrete taxonomy evaluation criteria

Fostering Business Model Extensions for ICT-Enabled Human-Centered Service Systems

When improving human-centered service systems (HCSSs) with information and communications technology (ICT), financial aspects are important but challenging for companies with established business models (BMs). The use of ICT and changes in value creation reflect business needs, but commercial success requires modifications and extensions of the BMs. However, prevailing approaches do not take account of these requirements. In this paper, we present a BM design process that fosters the extension of BMs for ICT-enabled HCSSs to support service innovations. Using an action research project in the field of volunteering, we iterated and revised the BM design process in a project collaboration with three end-user companies having similar objectives. The process guides those responsible for service innovation in structuring, analyzing, and the decision-making of alternative BM extensions. Thus, the presented approach contributes to ICT-related service innovation projects by describing systematic and repeatable activities that are the first step for commercial success

'License to VIT’ - A Design Taxonomy for Visual Inquiry Tools

Visual Inquiry Tools are valuable assets to work conjointly on an ill-structured or wicked problem and solve it creatively. With visual inquiry tools, designers can sketch the problem-space of an artifact-to-be-designed and generate solutions in a priori defined ontological elements. While there exists guidance in how visual inquiry tools should be designed content-wise, there is a lack of clarification on the design options available to design them. Subsequently, the paper proposes a taxonomy of visual inquiry tools outlining options for their design. We do this by incorporating a sample of 24 visual inquiry tools developed in the scientific literature corpus as well as 15 through empirical example

Fintech Trends Relationships Research: A Bibliometric Citation Meta-Analysis

This paper presents a review among how scholarly research on Fintech trends relationships has evolved over the past years by conducting a bibliometric citation. This literature analysis was based on the publication journals and articles in the ISI Web of Science databases. We show the impact of cited journals, key articles and outline possible future research avenues. Also, we map how the top publications are related in terms of their citation relationships and identify six different research fields, or lines of enquiry: (1) Payments, (2) Insurance, (3) Deposit & Lending, (4) Capital Raising, (5) Investment Management, (6) Market Provisioning. The study explores rankings of fintech-related journals list the first six journals had contributed eighty percentage of published papers, and concerned with the roles of information and communication technologies in the economy and society. Focusing on the research frontiers in finance, our paper identifies emerging research trends. We highlight possible pathways for researchers to build on existing knowledge and pursue opportunities for innovative and exciting new research contributing to an expansion of the research frontiers