Leading Digital Socio-Economy to Efficiency -- A Primer on Tokenomics

Through the usage of cryptographically secure and digitally scarce tokens, a next evolutionary step of the Internet has come. Cryptographic token represent a new phenomena of the crypto movement with the ability to program rules and incentives to steer participant behaviors that transforms them from purely technical to socio-economic innovations. Tokens allow the coordination, optimization and governing large networks of resources in a decentralized manner and at scale. Tokens bring powerful network effects that reward participants relative to their stage of adoption, the value they contribute and the risk they bear in an auditable, decentralized and therefore trustful way. We illustrate which important role tokenomics plays in the creation of, and sustainable and efficient operation of cooperations.Comment: 9 page

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Coopetition as an emerging organisational strategy for supply chain resilience: an exploratory study of the UKCS oil and gas sector.

Coopetition, a form of inter-organisational relationship that combines competitive and collaborative theories, has gained the interests of academics and practitioners of inter-organisational studies. However, despite numerous extensive coopetition reviews, several questions remain unanswered - especially with regards to the formation of the strategy. Although studies have acknowledged that coopetition can occur unintentionally, particularly among organisations in pre-existing collaborative relationships, it remains unclear how or if the nature of formation affects the performance or outcome of the coopetitive relationship. It is therefore necesssary for continued research efforts into the study of coopetition as an emergent strategy. This research addresses issues in coopetition studies with the specific aim of uncovering the relationship between the formation of coopetition alliances and its performance. The study argues that antecedents for successful intentional coopetition may not apply in coopetition that emerges unintentionally. Using the UK Oil and Gas Industry as a case study, this research investigates some of the factors that can improve the performance of emergent coopetition, such as its management, form of governance and the role of dedicated alliance functions. The study compares the antecedents for successful deliberate coopetition with the performance of unintentional coopetition. Drawing upon research from inter-organisational studies and interviews of oil and gas industry experts, this study proposes some hypotheses and a conceptual model relating to the interactions of the governance structure, control mechanisms, and management on the performance of both intentional and unintentional coopetition. Additionally, it investigates the role of supply chain flexibility on coopetition performance. The structural equation model is tested using empirical data obtained through web-based questionnaires from 380 supply chain professionals in the oil and gas industry. The results of this study confirm that the management technique and control mechanisms have a significant effect on the outcome of both intentional and unintentional coopetition. In contrast, the flexibility of the supply chain has little impact on the performance of the alliance. The study contributes to inter-organisational studies by demonstrating that the presence of a dedicated alliance function and contractual agreements are critical antecedents in the formation of a coopetitive alliance, including emergent coopetition. The study also highlights its limitations and recommends areas for further research

Breaking data silos with Federated Learning

Federated learning has been recognized as a promising technology with the potential to revolutionize the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). By leveraging its decentralized nature, it has the potential to overcome known barriers to AI, such as data acquisition and privacy, paving the way for unprecedented advances in AI. This dissertation argues the benefits of this technology as a catalyst for the irruption of AI both in the public and private sector. Federated learning promotes cooperation among otherwise competitive entities by enabling cooperative efforts to achieve a common goal. In this dissertation, I investigate the goodness-of-fit of this technology in several contexts, with a focus on its application in power systems, financial institutions, and public administrations. The dissertation comprises five papers that investigate various aspects of federated learning in the aforementioned contexts. In particular, the first two papers explore promising venues in the energy sector, where federated learning offers a compelling solution to privately exploit the vast amounts of data and decentralized ownership of data by consumers. The third paper elaborates on another paradigmatic example, in which federated learning is used to foster cooperation among financial institutions to produce accurate credit risk models. The fourth paper makes a juxtaposition with the previous ones centered on the private sector. It elaborates on the use cases of federated learning for public administrations to reduce barriers to cooperation. Lastly, the fifth and last article acts as a finale of this dissertation, compiles the earlier work and elaborates on the constraints and opportunities associated with adopting this technology, as well as a framework for doing so.R-AGR-3787 - EU 2020 - MDOT (01/07/2020 - 31/12/2023) - FRIDGEN GilbertR-AGR-3728 - PEARL/IS/13342933/DFS (01/01/2020 - 31/12/2024) - FRIDGEN Gilber

Transforming the Productivity of People in the Built Environment: Emergence of a Digital Competency Management Ecosystem

This chapter explores how we create and support a digitally enabled, agile, competent, and ultimately, productive workforce and determines the key research questions that need to be addressed if Digital Built Britain (DBB) is to provide return on investment and succeed as the catalyst for evolving the manner in which we conceive, plan, design, construct, operate, and interact with the built environment. The proposed vision is a digital competency management ecosystem where interdependent stakeholders are incentivised to work together in coopetition to create, capture, infer, interpret, specify, integrate, accredit, apply, use, monitor, and evolve competence as a working (data) asset. This needs to be in a consistent, objective, explicit, and scalable manner, with end2end transparency and traceability for all stakeholders that overcome the challenges of competency management. Moreover, a core element must be an ecosystem organised around digital infrastructure of competency frameworks and other knowledge sources of competence, so that competency frameworks are in digital operation and dynamic context

Essays on entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting

The present dissertation consists of five studies on entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting in the framework of industrial engineering. The focus is to show how the pattern of innovative behavior pursued by firms is determinant in several phases of the firm's lifecycle, starting with chapter 1 which consists of an introductory paper around the role of academies as accelerators of knowledge exploitation, their flows on the translation of science results into privately appropriable knowledge. The first paper makes a review of the theoretical background on the topics of technology transfer and innovation, taking as references the US and the European experiences. It functions as a theoretical basis for framing out a set of innovative papers on the general topic of entrepreneurial transference of technology and patenting. Chapter 2 studies the impact of a set of determinants for assessing the academic patent's value, based on two samples, 281 patents from Cambridge University, UK, and 160 patents from Carnegie Mellon University, US. Here, size of the patent family impacts positively on the value of the academic patent and the time to maturity and the geographical scope denote a negative influence. In addition, for spin-off firms from Carnegie Mellon University, the impact of geographical scope tends to be negative and significant. For the Cambridge University spin-offs, two main effects are detected, firstly, a negative and significant effect of time to maturity and secondly a positive and significant impact of the technical field on the patent's value. Chapter 3 analyzes the determinants behind the firms’ innovative behavior and their coopetition dynamics, by using a dataset of 3682 manufacturing firms and 1221 service firms from the European Community Innovation Survey (CIS), 2008. Results reveal that the manufacturing and service firms' capacity to generate product and service innovations denote a significant influence for sustaining an innovative behavior. In fact, coopetition arrangements between competitors and other R&D stakeholders and the firm's capacity to introduce innovations into the market are major drivers of innovative performance. Furthermore, service firms denote that the introduction of process innovations inside the firm and the internal R&D activities are of major importance for spurring the firm's capacity to generate innovations. Chapter 4 analyzes the firm's growth determinants, going a little bit further than previous studies by introducing proxies such as IP rights transactions, e.g., in-licensing activities and out-licensing activities, making use of a sample of 818 firms (high-tech and medium high-tech) created in 2004 and tracked by the Kauffman Foundation in the subsequent six years xii period. The main conclusions point out there is a significant and positive impact of R&D intensity and of the in-license of external patents on the firm’s growth. Additionally, there is a negative and significant effect of the squared R&D intensity on the growth path of the firm, which reveals a U-inverted relationship to firm’s growth, that is, a positive impact on firm growth in an early stage, followed by a negative impact after achieving the optimal level. This impact is also reflected when we control for the activity sector, having a major effect on high-tech manufacturing industries and high-tech knowledge intensive service firms. Finally in the fifth chapter, the research focus is about the determinants of firm's growth and success and the prediction of the major factors that affect their survival avoiding exit. The sample we use is a sample of 4928 firms created in 2004 and followed by the Kauffman Foundation in the subsequent six years period. A special attention is devoted to the gazelle firms, since they are a key agent in the scope of the knowledge based entrepreneurial economy. From one side, we analyze the firms’ characteristics like age, size, IP intensity (namely, patents, copyrights and trademarks) and, from the other side, we study a set of founders’ traits, namely, age, work experience, educational background and gender, which are able to affect business survival. Results show that being a manufacturing gazelle which undertakes a corporate strategy oriented at innovation intensity is less probable to exit than the opposite. Conversely, the IPR portfolio of the firm (mainly patents and copyrights) denotes an important effect on its survival ratios. Furthermore, the paper denotes that small firms with more or less 4 years, whose founders, mainly males, with no university degree and with more than 35 years old are significantly more predictive of surviving than other firms

The open innovation research landscape: established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis

This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholars – having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on ‘Researching Open Innovation’ at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI – originally an organisational-level phenomenon – across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research – particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation

Last mile delivery in the retail sector in an urban context

Last mile delivery (LMD) is a critical yet ambiguous stage of every supply chain. Previous studies have indicated that LMD is one of the most expensive, inefficient and polluting stages of the supply chain yet, despite its importance, the concept of LMD remains unclear in both academic and industry contexts. The use of different phrases, unclear boundaries and uncertain definitions and structures cause LMD to remain unclear. Thus, this study aims to demystify the basic understanding of LMD in terms of terminology, definition, scope, dimensions and structures. It then aims to introduce an initiative to improve the performance of LMD. A systematic literature review and content analysis are used to clarify the definition, dominant terminology and boundary of LMD, and investigate how the literature addresses these. The study then uses the ontology concept to discover and classify the LMD component, which provides a framework for extracting potential problems, solutions and structures for LMD. The proposed ontology is also used to map the LMD literature and identify the gaps in the literature. Using the proposed ontology, LMD is categorised into 40 structures that are employed to discover the structure of LMD used by major retailers and third-party logistics in the city of Melbourne. The results indicate that warehouses and distribution centres are the most common places that the investigated companies used to begin LMD. The results also indicate that the LMD process is usually finalised at stores in the business-to-business (B2B) context, while it is finalised at consignees location in the business-to-consumer (B2C) context. The companies investigated in this study mostly prepared the orders at factories, warehouses or distribution centres in the B2B context and prepared orders at stores in the B2C context. Considering these findings, along with coopetition strategy, this study develops an initiative to improve LMD performance. This study proposes a conceptual model for collaboration in the form of coopetition between retailers and logistics providers, and develops mathematical models to evaluate and optimise the initiative. The conceptual model is formed based on sharing 'empty running vehicles' between different delivery networks to decrease the cost and lead-time of delivery simultaneously. A mixed-integer linear programming model solved by genetic algorithm is developed to discover the optimised vehicle-sharing combinations. The results indicate that the proposed model with coopetition decreases delivery cost and lead-time by 60% and 56%, respectively. The results also indicate that the model reduces travelling distance by 66%, which contributes positively to environmental effects. The scenarios with and without coopetition strategy are then compared using real data from the city of Melbourne, which confirms the improvements of the proposed model with coopetition. The results of a case study show that the LMD model with coopetition strategy reduces cost, lead-time and travelling distance by 55%, 46% and 64%, respectively, which is almost similar to the results of random instance sets. This thesis makes significant theoretical and practical contributions in relation to LMD and employing coopetition strategy in this area. This thesis provides a conclusion regarding the domain terminology, definition and scope of LMD, and presents classified components and structures of LMD, which help create a common understanding among people working and studying in this field. This study presents an LMD model with coopetition among carriers sharing empty running vehicles, which decreases cost, lead-time, travelling distance and the number of vehicles required. The implementation of the proposed model on a large scale can reduce congestion and improve the sustainability aspects of deliveries in cities. The results of this study encourage decision makers in government authorities to identify empty running vehicles in cities and facilitate collaboration among different networks and companies. Moreover, LMD stakeholders such as residents, authorities and end consumers may enjoy the benefits of the proposed coopetition model without being involved in the coopetition practice directly. A shorter time for receiving parcels and lower price of service are the potential benefits experienced by end consumers, while reduced traffic and reduced negative environmental effects are the potential advantages for residents and government authorities. An initiative two-echelon vehicle routing problem (VRP) model is presented to simultaneously minimise lead-time and cost in this study, which has not previously been presented in the LMD context. Moreover, the proposed two-echelon VRP model can be used in other contexts and disciplines

INCENTIVES IN SERVICE VALUE NETWORKS – ON TRUTHFULNESS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND INTEROPERABILITY

The concurrence of technical and behavioral trends – such as lightweight approaches for service composition and a rising demand for customized services – fosters the emergence of a novel organizational paradigm: Service Value Networks (SVN). Distributed and highly-specialized service providers contribute to an overall value proposition. SVNs provide means for the ad-hoc composition of services that satisfies individual customers\u27 needs. However, the distributed nature of these environments and the opportunistic behavior of participants require a purposeful design of incentives. Our contribution is threefold: We (i) provide an auction mechanism – the Complex Service Auction – to coordination value creation in SVNs which is incentive compatible in dominant strategies (truthful). To restore budget balance – the prerequisite for a mechanism\u27s sustainability – and to implement incentives that increase a network\u27s degree of interoperability, we (ii) present the Interoperability Transfer Function (ITF). Applying an agent-based simulation method, we (iii) numerically show that this payment scheme limits strategic behavior of service providers and strengthens interoperability endeavors compared to a benchmark transfer function