Prototyping a Health and Wellbeing Platform in a Living Lab Setting

A key challenge older adults face is the ability to live independently. Losing their everyday independence is a major concern for older adults. Partly, because they fear this could lead to an involuntary move to an assisted living facility instead of living independently. Since 2015, the Dutch government encourages their citizens to age-in-place, but at the same time struggles how to implement new healthcare regulations. To support both the government and the citizens, we propose an online platform to match supply and demand in the health and wellbeing domain. Such a platform should not only enable end-users to enhance self-management, but also support them to find solutions for everyday problems related to aging-in-place. To illustrate our action design research we established a Living Lab in a metropolitan area in the Netherlands, and developed a prototype of the proposed platform in a real-life setting. The usability of the alpha version of the platform is evaluated with six potential end-users. Their comments are input for next iterations where the ADR team will constantly observe the effects of the platform in a complex social process within the Living Lab setting

Action Design Research for Social Innovation: Lessons from Designing a Health and Wellbeing Platform

IT artifacts play an important role in solving societal problems and realizing social innovations. Existing practice-inspired design science research (DSR) approaches, such as Action Design Research (ADR), do not consider social innovation as an explicit starting point for design iterations. In this paper, we explore how social innovation as a starting point affects the ADR approach. By reflecting on a three-year long ADR project in the domain of health and wellbeing, we suggest four principles to extend the ADR approach: (1) Translate a societal problem into practical problems on a stakeholder-level; (2) Reciprocal shaping between social practices and the IT artifact; (3) Involve citizens early and throughout the project; and (4) Balance political, economic and societal values for evaluating ADR results

Impact of artificial intelligence on education for employment: (learning and employability Framework)

Sustainable development has been a global goal and one of the key enablers to achieve the sustainable development goals is by securing decent jobs. However, decent jobs rely on the quality of education an individual has got, which value the importance of studying new education for employment frameworks that work. With the evolution of artificial intelligence that is influencing every industry and field in the world, there is a need to understand the impact of such technology on the education for employment process. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and assess how AI can foster the education for employment process? And what is the harm that such technology can brings on the social, economical and environmental levels? The study follows a mapping methodology using secondary data to identify and analyze AI powered startups and companies that addressed the learning and employability gaps. The study revealed twelve different AI applications that contribute to 3 main pillars of education for employment; career exploration and choice, skills building, and job hunting. 94% of those applications were innovated by startups. The review of literature and study results showed that AI can bring new level of guidance for individuals to choose their university or career, personalized learning capabilities that adapt to the learner\u27s circumstance, and new whole level of job search and matchmaking

Development of the Digital Matchmaking Platform for international cooperation in the biogas sector

Received: January 12th, 2021 ; Accepted: March 27th, 2021 ; Published: March 31st 2021 ; Correspondence: [email protected] demand for sustainable, renewable and clean energy sources has been increasing in the past decade in order to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Biogas has proven to be a versatile energy carrier which can be used for heating purposes, power and fuel. Having acknowledged the high potential for the use of biogas energy and having researched the demand and supply markets, the Digital Global Biogas Cooperation (DiBiCoo) project aims to link European biogas and biomethane technology providers with emerging and developing markets. To achieve this goal the development and application of innovative digital support tools is necessary - a digital matchmaking platform (DMP) with bi-directional partnership architecture. DMP can be used as means to build trust-based business relationships, share information on available European technologies and serve as an additional marketing option for EU and non-EU companies and industries. This article presents the developed platform prototype and demonstrates its basic functionality and the development process. Basic business and functional requirements were defined and then refined into functional, user-interface and performance requirements for implementation. User requirements were defined using user centred design approach in collaboration with potential platform end-users, considering their specific needs. During the development process Agile methodology was used. In the future digital platform functionality will be extended based on discussions and feedback of the stakeholders and end-users during local workshops and other events, where the DiBiCoo platform will be presented

German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds

This study reviews – through desk research and expert interviews with Mittelstand companies, startups and ecosystem experts – the current status of the Israeli startup ecosystem and the Mittelstand region of North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW), Germany. As a case study, it highlights potential opportunities for collaboration and analyzes different engagement modes that might serve to connect the two regions. The potential synergies between the two economies are based on a high degree of complementarity. A comparison of NRW’s key verticals and Israel’s primary areas of innovation indicates that there is significant overlap in verticals, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), sensors and cybersecurity. Israeli startups can offer speed, agility and new ideas, while German Mittelstand companies can contribute expertise in production and scaling, access to markets, capital and support. The differences between Mittelstand companies and startups are less pronounced than those between startups and big corporations. However, three current barriers to fruitful collaboration have been identified: 1) a lack of access, 2) a lack of transparency regarding relevant players in the market, and 3) a lack of the internal resources needed to select the right partners, often due to time constraints or a lack of internal expertise on this issue. To ensure that positive business opportunities ensue, Mittelstand companies and startups alike have to be proactive in their search for cooperation partners and draw on a range of existing engagement modes (e.g., events, communities, accelerators). The interviews and the research conducted for this study made clear that no single mode of engagement can address all the needs and challenges associated with German-Israeli collaboration

Can the Power of Platforms be Harnessed for Governance?

The platform concept examines how strategic leadership and institutional and technological resources enable multiple distributed activities to innovate, adapt, and change. The central question addressed in this paper is: Can this potentially powerful organizing logic be harnessed for public purposes? Since governance platforms are still largely experimental, we cannot fully settle this question at present. However, we can begin to address the issue to help scholars and practitioners explore the potential of platforms. We start with a general statement about what governance platforms might offer to the public sector, before probing the concept more deeply. We then investigate the institutional mechanisms that purportedly make platforms powerful and propose a typology of governance platforms. Finally, we investigate the challenges and successes they have encountered

Agency and servitude in platform labour:a feminist analysis of blended cultures

Digital labour platforms have become important sites of negotiation between expressions of micro-entrepreneurship, worker freedom and dignity of work. In the Global South, these negotiations are overlaid on an already fraught relationship mediated by the dynamics of caste and culture, to the usual politics of difference. Urban Company (UC), an app-based, on-demand platform in India that connects service providers offering home-based services to potential customers, lists professionalised services that have hitherto been considered part of a ‘culture of servitude’, performed by historically marginalised groups afforded little dignity of labour. Such platforms offer the possibility of disrupting the entrenched ‘master-servant’ relationship that exists in many traditional cultures in the Global South by their ostensibly professional approach. While service providers now have the opportunity for self-employment and gain ‘respectability’ by being associated with the platform, UC claims to have leveraged AI to automate discipline in everything the providers do. Using interviews with UC women service providers involved in beauty work and software development engineers, this paper explores the agency afforded to service partners in both professional and personal spheres. Further, we propose the term blended cultures to think about the ways in which algorithms and human cultures mutually (re)make each other.</p

Innovations in Open Grantmaking

Grantmaking, in short, plays a vital role in helping our government, our researchers, and our communities confront 21st-century challenges. Despite grantmaking's importance, we have a decidedly 20th-century system in place for deciding how we make these billions of dollars of crucial public investments. To make the most of limited funding—and help build confidence in the ability of public investments to make a positive difference—it is essential for our government agencies to try more innovative approaches to designing, awarding, and measuring their grantmaking activities.Innovations in Open Grantmaking seeks to provide inspiration and early proof of concept regarding innovative practices at every stage of the grantmaking process. The examples and lessons included can act as suggested guidelines for future research and experimentation around more openly and effectively providing access to public money