Governing Innovation in E-Health Platform Ecosystems – Key Concepts and Future Directions

This paper conceptualizes knowledge in the IS literature on governing innovation in platform ecosystems using boundary resources. Platform innovation arises when platform owners realize the need to expand the functionalities and invite external actors with specialized knowledge to do so. We conduct a literature review to identify the relevant concepts on governing innovation in platform ecosystems in IS and adapt them to the specific settings of the eHealth context. As most relevant concepts, we identify: 1) boundary resources as governance mechanisms: openness vs. control; 2) co-creating platform innovation across heterogeneous actors: accommodation vs. resistance; and 3) platform innovation within the underlying architecture: stability vs. flexibility. We then derive areas that should be prone to further research in eHealth, defined as: 1) patient data as a resource for eHealth platform innovation; 2) the role of institutions in eHealth platform innovation; and 3) innovating within platform-oriented eHealth information infrastructures. This paper contributes by expanding the understanding of the current state of knowledge in IS on governing innovation in platform ecosystems and provides basis for further research adapted to the eHealth context settings

Adoption of Software Platforms: Reviewing Influencing Factors and Outlining Future Research

Software platforms have received attention as the dominant model for cooperative software development. Growing the ecosystems around software platforms through increasing adoption by users and developers is of great importance for platform owners. However, there is a lack of research on how to increase adoption and growth of software platforms systematically. To address this issue, we conduct a literature review and make an in-depth analysis to uncover and organize factors that drive adoption of software platforms. Additionally, we derive effective directions of these factors on the respective sides. Finally, we outline three avenues for future research: aligning research on platform governance and platform launch and growth, taking an evolutionary, growth-oriented perspective on governance of software platforms and further detailing platform launch and growth strategies towards a design theory for platform launch. This paper contributes to the understanding of software platforms by reviewing factors driving adoption and triggering network effects

Reconceptualizing platforms in information systems research through the lens of service-dominant logic

Platforms have gained significant attention in the field of information systems (IS) research. However, the concept of platforms remains fluid and complex due to the diverse phenomena associated with it. Research to date tends to cluster around two predominant perspectives: the economic network perspective and the architectural design perspective. To reconcile the divergent perspectives of platforms and establish a more cohesive foundation for IS theorizing, we undertake an interpretive literature review through the lens of service-dominant (S-D) logic. Drawing on an extensive analysis of the literature, we develop an S-D Platform Framework that provides a deep understanding of the multifaceted nature of platforms as a vital IS capability for value co-creation. This framework sheds light on the fundamental facets of relationality, ambidexterity, and cooperativity, which explain the deep structure of platforms in the realm of IS research. Building on our proposed framework, we put forth an agenda that aims to guide future studies towards a more theoretically compelling trajectory

Add-on Solution Success: A Configurational View on Knowledge Sharing in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms serve as a foundation upon which manifold firms develop complementary add-ons to address heterogeneous customer needs. In order to successfully stimulate partner contributions platform vendors need to share knowledge with partners that enables them to develop add-ons. Vendors face a trade-off between addressing idiosyncratic needs of partners while ensuring the scalability of knowledge sharing. Literature indicates that standardized or idiosyncratic knowledge sharing does not per se result in successful outcomes, but rather depends on how knowledge sharing addresses characteristics of the platform’s architecture. In order to increase our understanding of this trade-off we derive a typology of platform architecture and knowledge sharing. We conduct an empirical study at a large enterprise platform vendor to uncover configurations of knowledge sharing approaches. We distill successful knowledge sharing approaches following a set-theoretic approach. Our research in progress offers insights into our preliminary results and gives an outlook on our future research

Designing Data Spaces

This open access book provides a comprehensive view on data ecosystems and platform economics from methodical and technological foundations up to reports from practical implementations and applications in various industries. To this end, the book is structured in four parts: Part I “Foundations and Contexts” provides a general overview about building, running, and governing data spaces and an introduction to the IDS and GAIA-X projects. Part II “Data Space Technologies” subsequently details various implementation aspects of IDS and GAIA-X, including eg data usage control, the usage of blockchain technologies, or semantic data integration and interoperability. Next, Part III describes various “Use Cases and Data Ecosystems” from various application areas such as agriculture, healthcare, industry, energy, and mobility. Part IV eventually offers an overview of several “Solutions and Applications”, eg including products and experiences from companies like Google, SAP, Huawei, T-Systems, Innopay and many more. Overall, the book provides professionals in industry with an encompassing overview of the technological and economic aspects of data spaces, based on the International Data Spaces and Gaia-X initiatives. It presents implementations and business cases and gives an outlook to future developments. In doing so, it aims at proliferating the vision of a social data market economy based on data spaces which embrace trust and data sovereignty

Towards Modular and Flexible Access Control on Smart Mobile Devices

Smart mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have become an integral part of our daily personal and professional lives. These devices are connected to a wide variety of Internet services and host a vast amount of applications, which access, store and process security- and privacy-sensitive data. A rich set of sensors, ranging from microphones and cameras to location and acceleration sensors, allows these applications and their back end services to reason about user behavior. Further, enterprise administrators integrate smart mobile devices into their IT infrastructures to enable comfortable work on the go. Unsurprisingly, this abundance of available high-quality information has made smart mobile devices an interesting target for attackers, and the number of malicious and privacy-intrusive applications has steadily been rising. Detection and mitigation of such malicious behavior are in focus of mobile security research today. In particular, the Android operating system has received special attention by both academia and industry due to its popularity and open-source character. Related work has scrutinized its security architecture, analyzed attack vectors and vulnerabilities and proposed a wide variety of security extensions. While these extensions have diverse goals, many of them constitute modifications of the Android operating system and extend its default permission-based access control model. However, they are not generic and only address specific security and privacy concerns. The goal of this dissertation is to provide generic and extensible system-centric access control architectures, which can serve as a solid foundation for the instantiation of use-case specific security extensions. In doing so, we enable security researchers, enterprise administrators and end users to design, deploy and distribute security extensions without further modification of the underlying operating system. To achieve this goal, we first analyze the mobile device ecosystem and discuss how Android's security architecture aims to address its inherent threats. We proceed to survey related work on Android security, focusing on system-centric security extensions, and derive a set of generic requirements for extensible access control architectures targeting smart mobile devices. We then present two extensible access control architectures, which address these requirements by providing policy-based and programmable interfaces for the instantiation of use-case specific security solutions. By implementing a set of practical use-cases, ranging from context-aware access control, dynamic application behavior analysis to isolation of security domains we demonstrate the advantages of system-centric access control architectures over application-layer approaches. Finally, we conclude this dissertation by discussing an alternative approach, which is based on application-layer deputies and can be deployed whenever practical limitations prohibit the deployment of system-centric solutions

Data spaces and the (trans)formations of data innovation and governance

In this thesis, I theorize data innovation and governance as simultaneous processes and account for the distinctive nature of data. Utilizing the concept of space, I show how data innovation and governance in multi-actor environments unfold across certain structures of possible forms, and how the realities data refer to condition the forms innovation and governance can take. The uniqueness of data entities has been of interest to information systems scholars, imparting distinct value-creation possibilities and dedicated governance approaches. In the literature on digital innovation, data have been referred to as semantic entities whose value can be open-endedly explored once assigned meaning by actors to fulfill various goals and purposes. Across the literature on data governance, data have been referred to as strategic assets that are governed by organizations. This duality of data – as valuable resources that at the same time require proper governance – has also been central in practical debates, such as the European Union’s aspirations for developing data spaces as shared infrastructures for innovating with data, while preserving European values, laws and regulations. Data innovation commonly requires recombining data that are produced, copied, shared, and used across multiple actors, requiring forms of governance extending beyond the boundaries of single organizations. In this thesis, I build on the process-oriented, realist ontology of assemblage theory to account for data’s distinctive nature and utilize the concept of space to theorize processes of innovation and governance in multi-actor environments. Data spaces, as argued in this thesis, are neither solely geometrical, nor networked; instead, provide forms across which processes of data innovation and governance can change their spatial configurations. Empirically, I study data spaces through an embedded case study in the highly regulated Norwegian healthcare sector dealing with personal and sensitive health data. The cases take an information infrastructure perspective on studying how health data (including electronic patient record data and patient-generated health data) were innovated with and governed across multiple public and private actors. Overall, the meta-analysis shows how innovation and governance with health data took on different forms as data were processed for various purposes across multiple intertwined data spaces. This thesis is aimed at theory-building and its contribution is two-fold. First, it shows how the concept of data spaces can be used to study processes of data innovation and governance as unfolding across various organizations, digital technologies, legal basis, and data sources, by changing their spatial configurations as certain thresholds are reached. Second, it shows how data do not simply decouple from the realities they refer to, rather, these realities condition the forms data innovation and governance can take and are shaped by these processes in return.publishedVersio

The Generative Capacity of Digital Artifacts: A Mapping of the Field

The concept of generativity as the capacity of a technology or a system to be malleable by diverse groups of actors in unanticipated ways has recently gained considerable traction in information systems research. We review a sample of the body of knowledge and identify that scholars commonly investigated generativity in conjunction with digital infrastructures and digital platforms, both of which are complex, networked, and evolving socio-technical systems. Interestingly, other types of digital artifacts have been neglected, despite our initial assumption that the distinct attributes (e.g., reprogrammability, distributedness) of any digital artifact match well with generativity. The literature review also reveals that innovation brought about heterogeneous groups of actors is universally regarded as the goal of generativity, discounting the possibility of exploiting generative systems towards other valuable ends such as organizational agility. Furthermore, scholars commonly discuss generativity in conjunction with the logic of modularity, leading to unresolved questions on how these two concepts might complement each other. Another important contribution of this paper is the systematization of various meanings of generativity, spanning from the philosophical–e.g., generative mechanisms in critical realist research–to a more literal understanding, for instance generativity as synonym to ‘creation of a particular solution’