Unternehmerisches Umdenken

Die Covid-19-Pandemie bringt viele Veränderungen. Es lohnt sich, bereits jetzt umzudenken für die Zeit danach.Footnot

Life is a Journey in Smart and Sustainable Districts

Worldwide, cities grapple with the expectation of putting the brakes on climate change. Before acting, smart districts often serve as a testing bed for strategies towards carbon-neutrality. If effective, scale-up agendas at city-level are formulated. Smart districts are touted for their sustainability lever, as their core rationale is encouraging residents to use ‘smart energy technologies’ which increase efficiency or integrate renewable energy sources. The primary focus of these districts is on technical implementations of available sustainability services instead of orienting their service-portfolio around citizens. The result is a mismatch of supply and demand of sustainability-inducing services. We take in a customer journey perspective when searching for literature and conducting qualitative interviews. Results reveal a framework for mapping service touchpoints into citizen journeys. The framework is meant to benefit district planners to tailor their service selection to meet their citizens’ needs and exploit the district’s sustainability potential at the citizen interface

Relying on storage or ICT? How to maintain low voltage grids' stability with an increasing feed-in of fluctuating renewable energy sources

Since the beginning of the new century our electricity system is changing rapidly. Distributed energy resources, such as wind or solar energies are becoming more and more important. These energies are producing fluctuating electricity, which is fed into low voltage distribution grids. The resulting volatility complicates the exact balancing of demand and supply. These changes can lead to distribution grid instabilities, damages of electronic devices or even power outages and might therefore end in deadweight losses affecting all electricity users. A concept to tackle this challenge is matching demand with supply in real-time, which is known as smart grids. In this study, we focus on two smart grids' key components: decentralized electricity storages and smart meters. The aim of this study is to provide new insights concerning the low diffusion of smart meters and decentralized electricity storages and to examine whether we are facing situations of positive externalities. During our study we conducted eight in-depth expert interviews. Our findings show that the diffusion of smart meters as well as decentralized electricity storages is widely seen as beneficial to society. This study identifies the most important stakeholders and various related private costs and benefits. As private benefits are numerous but widely distributed among distinct players, we argue that we face situations of positive externalities and thus societal desirable actions are omitted. We identify and discuss measures to foster diffusion of the two studied smart grid key components. Surprisingly, we find that direct interventions like subsidies are mostly not seen as appropriate even by experts from industries that would directly benefit from them. As the most important point, we identified well-designed and clearly defined regulatory and legal frameworks that are free of contradictions. --smart meter,decentralized electricity storage,smart grid,externality

Flexibilisierung der Hochschulbildung durch MOOCs : Disruption oder Integration

Mit dem Erscheinen von MOOCs und privatwirtschaftlichen MOOC-Anbietern entstand die Erwartung, dass die traditionelle Hochschulbildung „uberisiert“ wird wie das Taxigewerbe. Die Voraussetzungen für die Teilnahme an Hochschulbildung reduzierten sich auf die Existenz eines Internetanschlusses. Bald aber stellten die MOOC-Anbieter fest, dass Flexibilisierung und tiefe Kosten nicht genügten, um Hochschulbildung zu konkurrenzieren. Daher rich(te)ten sich MOOC-Anbieter neu aus – auf Weiterbildung und damit Personen mit abgeschlossener Hochschulbildung. Auch deshalb sind MOOCs bisher, gemessen am Ziel der Disruption traditioneller Hochschulbildung, als Misserfolg zu werten

How Digital Leadership competences and IT Capabilities affect an organization\u27s ability to digitally transform and adopt new technologies

Although much research has been done into the importance of IT Capabilities (ITC), Digital Leadership (DL) and Digital Transformation (DT) with regard to organizations’ firm performance and ability to thrive in the current digital market, there is little research on qualifying which specific ITC and DL competences affect the success of an organization\u27s DT and ultimately impact their ability to adopt newly emerging technologies. This research aims to address the influence of DL and ITC on DT as well as which specific DL competences and ITC might ultimately affect an organization’s ability to successfully adopt newly emerging digital technologies. Quantitative data collected through a survey was used for this analysis. It was found that Architecture Design (DLA5) has the strongest positive affect on DT