Digital dark matter within product service systems

© 2017, © Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The unobserved benefits of digital technologies are described as digital dark matter. Product service systems (PSSs) are bundles of products and services that deliver value in use, which is unobserved but generates benefits. This paper aims to empirically quantify digital dark matter within PSSs and correlates that measure with national competitiveness. Design/methodology/approach: A novel methodology establishes the link between customer needs and a product and digital service portfolio offered across ten developed economies. The case context is the music industry where product and services are often substitutes – a cannibalistic PSS. Consumer information is obtained from a unique database of more than 18,000 consumer surveys. Consumer demand for digital formats is modelled and predicted through logistic regressions. Findings: The work provides inverse estimations for digital dark matter within PSSs by calculating the gap between supply and demand for digital offers – described as the business model challenge. The USA has the lowest business model challenge; the home of major companies developing digital technologies. Digital dark matter is shown to be positively correlated with national competitiveness and manufacturing competitiveness indices. Practical implications: The success of a cannibalistic PSS requires good understanding of market demand. Governments embarking on soft innovation policies might incentivise the development of service-orientated business models based on digital technologies. Originality/value: Work expands theory on the concept of digital dark matter to the PSS literature. Empirically, a novel method is proposed to measure digital dark matter

Vision of a Visipedia

The web is not perfect: while text is easily searched and organized, pictures (the vast majority of the bits that one can find online) are not. In order to see how one could improve the web and make pictures first-class citizens of the web, I explore the idea of Visipedia, a visual interface for Wikipedia that is able to answer visual queries and enables experts to contribute and organize visual knowledge. Five distinct groups of humans would interact through Visipedia: users, experts, editors, visual workers, and machine vision scientists. The latter would gradually build automata able to interpret images. I explore some of the technical challenges involved in making Visipedia happen. I argue that Visipedia will likely grow organically, combining state-of-the-art machine vision with human labor

Digital Twins

Progression of the field depends on convergence of information technology, operational technology and protocol-agnostic telecommunications. Making sense of the data, ability to curate data and perform data analytics at the edge (or mist rather than in the fog or cloud) is key to value. Delivering engines to the edge are crucial for analytics at the edge when latency is critical. The confluence of these and other factors may chart the future path for Digital Twins. The number of unknown unknowns and the known unknowns in this process makes it imperative to create global infrastructures and organize groups to pursue the development of fundamental building blocks and new ideas through research.Multiple forms of digital transformation are imminent. Digital Twins represent one concept. It is gaining momentum because it may offer real-time transparency. Rapid diffusion of digital duplicates faces hurdles due to lack of semantic interoperability between architectures, standards and ontologies. The technologies necessary for automated discovery are in short supply

Reviewing literature on digitalization, business model innovation, and sustainable industry : past achievements and future promises

Digitalization is revolutionizing the way business is conducted within industrial value chains through the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, intensive data exchange and predictive analytics. However, technological application on its own is not enough; profiting from digitalization requires business model innovation such as making the transition to advanced service business models. Yet, many research gaps remain in analyzing how industrial companies can leverage digitalization to transform their business models to achieve sustainability benefits. Specifically, challenges related to value creation, value delivery, and value capture components of business model innovation need further understanding as well as how alignment of these components drive sustainable industry initiatives. Thus, this special issue editorial attempts to take stock of the emerging research field through a literature review and providing a synthesis of special issue contributions. In doing so, we contribute by developing a framework that communicates and sets the direction for future research by linking digitalization, business model innovation, and sustainability in industrial settings.fi=vertaisarvioimaton|en=nonPeerReviewed

Public Sector Open Source Software Projects -- How is development organized?

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out. When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities, while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e., projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond), which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through interviews with individuals from involved organizations.Comment: Registered Report accepted at MSR'2

How does music as a digital service affect consumerattitude and behaviour?

Digital technologies allow users to share files, which in some circumstances violates property rights and constitutes consumer misbehaviour. This form of behaviour, often called piracy, is cited as causing revenue loss to the creative industries. Existing empirical evidence is silent on consumer’s individual beliefs and their attitudes towards copyright infringement. A new concept dubbed the ‘Robin Hood’ tendency is developed as a quantitative measure of consumer belief that illegally copying and distributing digital resource is a legitimate form of behaviour. Analytical applications are developed which exploit a unique dataset comprising 18,000 data points for music consumers from ten countries. Results show that digital markets suffer from consumers who demonstrate the Robin Hood tendency and identifies that countries with strong institutions have fewer consumers with this attitude. Furthermore, evidence suggests that copyright law enforcement should be coupled with efforts to educate consumers as to the effect their misbehaviour has content creators

Digital Traces of Brain Drain: Developers during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked renewed interest in the phenomenon of brain drain: the exodus of human capital out of countries. Yet quantifying brain drain, especially in real time during crisis situations, remains difficult. This hinders our ability to understand its drivers and mechanisms and to anticipate its consequences. To address this gap, I draw on and extend a large scale dataset of the locations of highly active software developers collected in February 2021, one year before the invasion. Revisiting those developers that had been located in Russia in 2021, I confirm a significant exodus of developers from Russia by late June 2022. 8.6% of Russian developers list a new country, compared with 2.4% of developers from comparable countries in the region but not directly involved in the conflict. 11.3% of Russian developers have obscured their location (vs. 1.9% in the comparison set). Our data also allows us to observe heterogeneities in who leaves and who remains, and to see where they are going. Developers leaving Russia were significantly much more active and central in the collaboration network than those who stay behind. This suggests that the most important developers have already left Russia