T4Tags 2.0: a tool to support the serendipitous use of domestic technologies

The authors present an iterative design exploration to support serendipitous uses of technology: quick reconfigurations of the domestic environment to address inhabitants' current needs, whether they are transient and ephemeral or more habitual. As a result of this exploration, the authors developed T4Tags 2.0, an open-ended toolkit for programming Web-connected and versatile physical tokens embedded with different sensing technologies (including near field communication, physical buttons, and motion and environmental sensors) and can be easily integrated with existing artifacts. The design of the toolkit was informed by fieldwork that provided design drivers for domestic technologies that can be repurposed or appropriated through features such as end-user programming of device behavior and crowd-fueled appropriation by sharing "recipes" of programmed tokens. A user study with three families provides insights into system usefulness and the recipe-sharing functionality. The authors also discuss opportunities and challenges, reflecting on the tradeoffs of an open system in terms of user engagement, creative input, and real-world deployment. This article is part of a special issue on domestic pervasive computing.This research has been partially funded by the 2015 UC3M Post-Doc Mobility Scholarship and by the Academy of Finland (286440, Evidence

Take Me Out: Space and Place in Library Interactions

Information interactions are strongly affected by the place where they occur. Specific locations are ofen associated with searches on particular topics, and individual users perform different tasks in habituated places. A classic example of habituated space is the commuter who regularly reads the news on the train. This paper investigates these associations through four user studies that examine different uses of place in information interaction. Through this, we reveal the ways in which the location of information interactions makes them effective or ineffective. This extends our interpretation of the role of place in information interaction beyond established foci such as location-based search

Cross-disciplinary lessons for the future internet

There are many societal concerns that emerge as a consequence of Future Internet (FI) research and development. A survey identified six key social and economic issues deemed most relevant to European FI projects. During a SESERV-organized workshop, experts in Future Internet technology engaged with social scientists (including economists), policy experts and other stakeholders in analyzing the socio-economic barriers and challenges that affect the Future Internet, and conversely, how the Future Internet will affect society, government, and business. The workshop aimed to bridge the gap between those who study and those who build the Internet. This chapter describes the socio-economic barriers seen by the community itself related to the Future Internet and suggests their resolution, as well as investigating how relevant the EU Digital Agenda is to Future Internet technologists

Nature-inspired innovation policy: biomimicry as a pathway to leverage biodiversity for economic development

One of the most important challenges of the 21st century is the quest for economic development models that respect the planet's ecosystem. Rather than imposing our industrial systems on nature, why not let nature influence our industrial and innovation systems? From wind turbine blades to bullet trains and solar cells, many of the technologies we rely on today have been inspired by solutions found in nature. Although relatively widespread in the fields of architecture and engineering, biomimicry/biomimetics remains largely overlooked in economics, public policy, and development studies. This is paradoxical because the world's remaining biodiversity stock-a knowledge bank of solutions to both current and unknown challenges- is largely held in developing economies and can be leveraged as a source of inspiration for -and entry door to- industrial innovation. This paper, therefore, investigates the relevance of biomimicry in the formulation of sustainable development strategies in biodiverse developing countries and maps out the national policy landscapes that can advance it. Several findings arise from this study. First, despite the exponential growth of biomimicry as a field and our understanding of its economic impact, what drives nature-inspired innovation remains elusive. Second, the biomimicry innovation landscape is dominated by industrialised economies that have relied on proactive policy interventions, while virtually no developing country has adopted biomimicry as an innovation strategy, consolidating the exploitation of the biodiversity in the developing world by firms in high-income nations. Third, by drawing on empirical evidence from a selection of Latin American countries, this paper shows that while biomimicry presents tremendous opportunities to leapfrog towards high value-added knowledge-intensive activities by using local biodiversity and related expertise as factor endowments, policy, and institutional factors have led to the persistence of important coordination failures that hinder the expansion and commercialization of biomimicry-based R&D. This paper concludes by discussing the public policies needed to support the integration of developing nations at the innovation frontier through biomimicry

The Evolution of Concentrated Ownership in India Broad patterns and a History of the Indian Software Industry

As in many countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Sweden), concentrated ownership is a ubiquitous feature of the Indian private sector over the past seven decades. Yet, unlike in most countries, the identity of the primary families responsible for the concentrated ownership changes dramatically over time, perhaps even more than it does in the U.S. during the same time period. It does not appear that concentrated ownership in India is entirely associated with the ills that the literature has recently ascribed to concentrated ownership in emerging markets. If the concentrated owners are not exclusively, or even primarily, engaged in rent-seeking and entry-deterring behavior, concentrated ownership may not be inimical to competition. Indeed, as a response to competition, we argue that at least some Indian families the concentrated owners in question have consistently tried to use their business group structures to launch new ventures. In the process they have either failed hence the turnover in identity or reinvented themselves. Thus concentrated ownership is a result, rather than a cause, of inefficiencies in capital markets. Even in the low capital-intensity, relatively unregulated setting of the Indian software industry, we find that concentrated ownership persists in a privately successful and socially useful way. Since this setting is the least hospitable to the existence of concentrated ownership, we interpret our findings as a lower bound on the persistence of concentrated ownership in the economy at large.

Economic Development as Self-Discovery

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general-equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical and normative issues. We highlight two failures of the laissez-faire outcome: there is too little investment and entrepreneurship ex ante, and too much production diversification ex post. Optimal policy consists of counteracting these distortions: to encourage investments in the modern sector ex ante, but to rationalize production ex post. We provide some informal evidence on the building blocks of our model.

The effects of entrepreneurial ecosystems, knowledge management capabilities, and knowledge spillovers on international open innovation

While there is a large body of literature on the benefits of open innovation, little is known about the knowledge flows and the interrelationship of the purposeful and serendipitous spillover of knowledge flows that deliver value from international open innovation (IOI) collaborations. This study examines these knowledge flows occurring from IOI and the extent to which the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) context, knowledge management (KM) capabilities of the firm, and knowledge spillovers (KS), nurture IOI engagement. A quantitative study is adopted where data on 98,809 firms from 15 European Union countries to empirically tested a proposed model through multiple linear regressions of logit models. The results highlight the positive effect of KS on IOI engagement, and the positive mediating effect of KM capability on the relationship between KS and IOI. Additionally, the results show a positive moderating effect of the EE on the relationship between the firm's KM capability and IOI engagement. Additionally, the findings emphasize the beneficial nature of the EE on nurturing KM capabilities within firms located in the ecosystem and its impact on nurturing KS within the network.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management