Can Competitive Strategy and Open Business Strategy Coexist?

Traditional business models, driven by resource management and control, are under threat. There have been calls for increased corporate social responsibility, in addition to demands for improved and more transparent governance models. In addition, some argue that traditional resource control methods, such as patent acquisition and copyright enforcement, are ill-equipped to handle modern consumers and commercial relationships. Some have argued that business models based more on open strategy might address some of these problems. However, these open business models, largely enabled by the Internet and heightened ICT use, may be incompatible with contemporary competitive strategy theory and further research of the phenomenon is needed. This paper discusses the ways in which contemporary strategic theory might be threatened, and the ways in which an open strategy model could address these problems. The paper uses several case studies to illustrate this argument. The paper also conducts a literature search of the requirements for an open business model in a networked context

An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools

MDD tools are very useful to draw conceptual models and to automate code generation. Even though this would bring many benefits, wide adoption of MDD tools is not yet a reality. Various research activities are being undertaken to find why and to provide the required solutions. However, insufficient research has been done on a key factor for the acceptance of MDD tools: usability. With the help of end-users, this paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of MDD tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry. To illustrate the applicability of our framework, we instantiated it for performing a usability evaluation of a tool named INTEGRANOVA. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of the study with another usability evaluation technique based on ergonomic criteria.This work has been developed with the support of the Intra European Marie Curie Fellowship Grant 50911302 PIEF-2010, MICINN (TIN2008-00555, PROS-Req TIN2010-19130-C02-02), GVA (ORCA PROMETEO/2009/015), and co-financed with ERDF. We also acknowledge the support of the ITEA2 Call 3 UsiXML (20080026) and financed by the MITYC under the project TSI-020400-2011-20. Our thanks also to Ignacio Romeu for the video data gathering setup.Condori-Fernandez, N.; Panach Navarrete, JI.; Baars, AI.; Vos, TE.; Pastor López, O. (2013). An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools. Science of Computer Programming. 78(11):2245-2258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2012.07.017S22452258781

Exploring the Factors of Innovation Rejection

Computer systems cannot improve organisational performance if they aren’t adopted. There has been much research into why and how systems are adopted by organisations and individuals, however the area is still unable to explain the adoption phenomenon completely. At the same time, innovation rejection, as a topic, has been largely ignored in the research literature. This paper aims to develop a list of factors which affect innovation rejection and documents an initial attempt to develop a research model that describes technology rejection. This section of the study explores the research literature for factors that affect rejection. The results show rejection factors at the environment, the organisation, the workgroup and the system levels. However, there is very little evidence of factors at the adoption process level. This could be an interesting area for further research