Digitalization and Innovation

Developments in digital technology offer new opportunities to design new products and services. However, creating such digitalized products and services often creates new problems and challenges to firms that are trying to innovate. In this essay, we analyze the impact of digitalization of products and services on innovations. In particular, we argue that digitalization of products will lead to an emergence of new layered product architecture. The layered architecture is characterized by its generative design rules that connect loosely coupled heterogeneous layers. It is pregnant with the potential of unbounded innovations. The new product architecture will require organizations to adopt a new organizing logic of innovation that we dubbed as doubly distributed innovation network. Based on this analysis, we propose five key issues that future researchers need to explore.innovation, innovation, product architecture, design rules

Digital innovation: transforming research and practice

There is no doubt that digital technologies are spawning ongoing innovation across most if not all sectors of the economy and society. In this essay, we take stock of the characteristics of digital technologies that give rise to this new reality and introduce the papers in this special issue. In addition, we also highlight the unprecedent opportunities that digital innovation provides to study innovation processes more generally. Overall, we conclude that the speed, observability, and relative ease in investigating relationships between multiple analytical levels, mean that digital innovation is both a ‘model of’ that also provides a ‘model for’ the study of innovation processes more broadly in non-digital and hybrid contexts

Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Editing Team: Markus Fiedler

and contributions of the FIA community on the important research topics that should be addressed for the Framework Programme 8 research programmes broadly grouped around three main concerns; economic and business interests; societal interests and challenges; technical disruptions and capabilities. The contents of this roadmap originate with the community of researchers working on all aspects of the Future Internet and meet to share and discuss ideas through the Future Internet Assembly through an open consultation of research projects who participate in FIA. This roadmap is primarily concerned with identifying research that can be carried out in the second half of this decade and which will have an impact in 2020 and beyond. By ‘impact ’ we mean will result in products, services, systems, capabilities, that come to market and are available and deployed in that timeframe The approach adopted in this report is to integrate contributions across the entire space of future Internet research with the aim of bringing out the vision for how and where the Internet will make a significant difference in the future and identifying the broad challenges and gaps, and identifying the solutions and research needs in the future. In this report we have summarised and grouped ideas with the aim of identifying the strong themes and consistent challenges that emerge looking acros

South American Expert Roundtable : increasing adaptive governance capacity for coping with unintended side effects of digital transformation

This paper presents the main messages of a South American expert roundtable (ERT) on the unintended side effects (unseens) of digital transformation. The input of the ERT comprised 39 propositions from 20 experts representing 11 different perspectives. The two-day ERT discussed the main drivers and challenges as well as vulnerabilities or unseens and provided suggestions for: (i) the mechanisms underlying major unseens; (ii) understanding possible ways in which rebound effects of digital transformation may become the subject of overarching research in three main categories of impact: development factors, society, and individuals; and (iii) a set of potential action domains for transdisciplinary follow-up processes, including a case study in Brazil. A content analysis of the propositions and related mechanisms provided insights in the genesis of unseens by identifying 15 interrelated causal mechanisms related to critical issues/concerns. Additionally, a cluster analysis (CLA) was applied to structure the challenges and critical developments in South America. The discussion elaborated the genesis, dynamics, and impacts of (groups of) unseens such as the digital divide (that affects most countries that are not included in the development of digital business, management, production, etc. tools) or the challenge of restructuring small- and medium-sized enterprises (whose service is digitally substituted by digital devices). We identify specific issues and effects (for most South American countries) such as lack of governmental structure, challenging geographical structures (e.g., inclusion in high-performance transmission power), or the digital readiness of (wide parts) of society. One scientific contribution of the paper is related to the presented methodology that provides insights into the phenomena, the causal chains underlying “wanted/positive” and “unwanted/negative” effects, and the processes and mechanisms of societal changes caused by digitalization