Blockchain: A Business Model Innovation Analysis

The adoption of blockchain-based technologies by organisations can bring benefits in terms of firms' profitability, productivity and efficiency, making companies rethink their existing business models. However, as the technology is still developing and the research on the implications of the different types of blockchain networks (i.e. public, private, consortium) is scarce, their role in business model innovation requires closer attention. To address this gap, the paper provides a conceptual insight into the role of blockchain technology in companies with different value configurations by examining the technological conditions that can impact business models and probing the role of technology benefits in driving company value. The analysis contributes to the literature by discussing the business implications of innovative technologies and uncovering their positive and negative consequences for the value creation, delivery and capture activities. Such analysis sheds light on the functions of blockchains that have a differentiating impact on business processes. Also, the paper puts forward managerial implications by discussing the paths of business model innovation using blockchain technologies

In Things We Trust? Towards trustability in the Internet of Things

This essay discusses the main privacy, security and trustability issues with the Internet of Things

Internationalization process of Água das Pedras to China

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsIn spite of the success in the Portuguese market, its small dimension and its proximity to maturity, led Água das Pedras to internationalize its strategy and grow overseas. After the internationalization to Brazil, one considered China as a highly potential market for Pedras to succeed in, mainly due to its size and untapped demand. Hence, this report presents the competitive assessment of Pedras in the Portuguese market followed by a macro-environmental study of China as well as a detailed industry analysis. As the competitors’ analysis evidenced the potential of Pedras, an implementation plan is proposed through an Indirect Export Strategy

A Comprehensive Cloud Security Model with Enhanced Key Management, Access Control and Data Anonymization Features

A disgusting problem in public cloud is to securely share data based on fine grained access control policies and unauthorized key management. Existing approaches to encrypt policies and data with different keys based on public key cryptosystem are Attribute Based Encryption and proxy re-encryption. The weakness behind approaches is: It cannot efficiently handle policy changes and also problem in user revocation and attribute identification.  Even though it is so popular, when employed in cloud it generate high computational and storage cost. More importantly, image encryption is some out complex in case of public key cryptosystem. On the publication of sensitive dataset, it does not preserve privacy of an individual. A direct application of a symmetric key cryptosystem, where users are served based on the policies they satisfy and unique keys are generated by Data Owner (DO). Based on this idea, we formalize a new key management scheme, called Symmetric Chaos Based key Management (SCBKM), and then give a secure construction of a SCBKM scheme called AS-Chaos. The idea is to give some secrets to Key Manager (KM) based on the identity attributes they have and later allow them to derive actual symmetric keys based on their secrets. Using our SCBKM construct, we propose an efficient approach for fine-grained encryption-based access control for data stored in untrusted cloud storage

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

Improving construction takt production efficiency by using digitalization

The construction industry is one of the largest economies globally however, during the past decades construction production has only increased by 1% annually. With the actively growing urbanization, construction industry is looking for the methods to build faster and achieve a better production flow. Construction sites do generate a lot of data that could be used to boost the production but, this data is still being collected manually using spreadsheets and hand-written notes. In order to enhance productivity improvement and cost efficiency, manual data collection must be eliminated and digital technology and advanced automation should be infused into construction daily activities. The objective of this thesis was to develop standards for efficient digital data collection and to propose improvement ideas for applying the generated digital data in construction site management in construction company Fira Oy. The research was tackled with two methods: a literature review and a case study that included observations, examination of used digital tools and currently available data, and semi-structured interviews. The literature review provided a definition for good construction productivity, theoretical background of takt production and introduced the concept of digitalization in construction. The aim of the empirical research was to test applicability of takt production in residential project, identify data users, find available and missing data. Combining recent theory on takt production and digitalization in construction with outcomes of the case study, four essential behavioral changes were identified that can help to increase digitalization integration level at the construction site: creating clear common rules and instruction for all potential users of digital systems; providing intensive training for site management on digital tools, sufficient training of subcontractors; obliging subcontractors to takt plan following and digital tools usage through contracts; and establishing clear communication by organizing regular daily and weekly meetings. In addition, several technical development ideas were proposed. The outcomes of research were based on a single case study and therefore, further research is required to specify the results and test them. The research proved workability of takt production in residential projects and showed that digital tools can provide more accurate work tracking, possibility for efficient learning and continuous improvement through proper processing and analysis of collected data. Utilizing digital tools has become a prerequisite for the competitiveness in construction industry but only well planned implementation of digitalization can bring the success