How Design Plays Strategic Roles in Internet Service Innovation: Lessons from Korean Companies

In order to survive in the highly competitive internet business, companies have to provide differentiated services that can satisfy the rapidly changing users’ tastes and needs. Designers have been increasingly committed to achieving user satisfaction by generating and visualizing innovative solutions in new internet service development. The roles of internet service design have expanded from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a more strategic aspect. This paper investigates the methods of managing design in order to enhance companies’ competitiveness in internet business. The main research processes are to: (1) explore the current state of internet service design in Korea through in-depth interviews with professional designers and survey questionnaires to 30 digital design agencies and 60 clients; (2) compare how design is managed between in-house design groups and digital design agencies though the case studies of five Korean companies; and (3) develop a taxonomy characterizing four roles of designers in conjunction with the levels of their strategic contributions to internet service innovation: visualist, solution provider, concept generator, and service initiator. In addition, we demonstrate the growing contributions of the strategic use of design for innovating internet services, building robust brand equity, and increasing business performance. Keywords: Design Management; Internet Business; Internet Service Design; Digital Design; Digital Design Agency; In-House Design Group, Case Study</p

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Sales forecasting of stores in shopping malls: A study based on external data and transaction data

To improve the forecast accuracy of the sales of stores in shopping malls, this paper proposes a prediction method based on deep learning that comprehensively considers the external data, such as online review data of shopping mall stores, weather data, weekday/weekend data, and historical transaction data of the stores. To begin with, the online review data of the stores are pre-trained with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to complete the multi-label sentiment classification and obtain the intensity index of perceived sentiment of reviews. The index, together with other external data, such as online ratings, weather, weekday/weekend differences, and historical transactions of the stores, is pre-processed. At last, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the Attention models are used to predict the sales volume of stores in a certain shopping mall. The results show that the addition of external data – weather, weekday/weekend, online ratings and intensity index of sentiment of reviews – to the historical sales data-based model can effectively improve the forecast accuracy of store sales

Socializing Online in Various Cultural Contexts: A Cross Nation Study of Social Network Service Development

The boom of WWW-based social network service (SNS) warrants more studies and better understandings in many aspects, especially when such hedonic application has evolved differently in different countries. The development of SNS in the US, China and South Korea have been particularly interesting. Whereas U.S. SNS websites enjoy the first mover advantage, their followers in different cultural settings are trying to re-create the prosperity in their own domains. An analysis of the challenges and potentials of SNS in these countries is presented, along with a discussion of SNS research across different cultural settings. It is believed that in addition to marketing factors, socio-economic structure and cultural influences also play a critical role in promoting SNS website

Analysis Of Fraud On A Chinese Business Review Website

Recently, local business-review websites have gained popularity, but the problem of fraud has become more and more severe. We did research based on the biggest Chinese local business-review website: Dazhongdianping. We collected 792,364 reviews of every registered restaurant on the Dazhongdianping website in Hangzhou, and our findings include:1. Compared with US businesses Luca and Zervas (2016) who give both unfavorable reviews to their competitors and favorable reviews to their own business, Chinese businesses focus only on the latter, perhaps because of the differences in business ethics between the two countries.2. Review frauds have a close relationship with the user’s social network. Users with many followers and higher interaction scores are always more powerful than other users, and they also have reasonable incentives to commit fraud. We found that these users are more likely to post fake reviews.3. Finer restaurants are less likely to commit review fraud

An investigation of decision-making style of Chinese college student online apparel shoppers

Internet users in China increased to 210 million with an annual growth rate of 53.3 percent in 2007 (CNNIC, 2008). This dramatic increase of Internet usage in China provides numerous opportunities for online marketers. Thirty-eight percent of Chinese netizens are 18 to 24 years old, among whom college netizens account for a large proportion in China (CNNIC, 2008). Given the market potential of targeting this group, research is needed to understand Chinese college students’ online shopping behavior. The purpose of this research was to better understand Chinese college student online apparel shoppers by investigating their decision-making style and explore the relationships between their decision-making characteristics and related online apparel shopping behavior and consumption. Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) developed by Sproles and Kendall (1986) was adopted as a theoretical framework to guide this study. CSI has been recognized as a useful tool to understand consumers’ shopping orientation. This market tool has been applied to effectively understand consumers from different countries and cultures (Lysonski, Srini, & Zotos, 1996). However, no research has been done to apply this tool to understanding Chinese college students as online apparel shoppers. This research intends to fill the identified gap. This empirical study employed an online survey for data collection. A questionnaire was developed and administered to students at five universities from different cities in China. This study found that Chinese college students spent more time online on pre-purchase decision-making activities. Most of the respondents spent time looking for interesting apparel products and evaluating different apparel products online, but not on ordering the selected products. The results demonstrated that some of the characteristics of the CSI are related to the frequency of buying apparel online, and the dollar amount spent online for apparel purchasing. The findings show that recreational consciousness, hedonistic consciousness, brand consciousness, habitual consciousness, and brand-loyalty consciousness have significant correlations with the frequency of online apparel purchases. However, only brand conscious and habitual conscious, brand-loyalty conscious are significantly correlated with the amount of money spent online for apparel purchases by Chinese college students