Sharing Economy or Skimming Economy? A Review on the Sharing Economy\u27s Impact

During the last years, the Sharing Economy with its prominent trailblazers like Airbnb and Uber has become ubiquitous in our daily lives, enabling us to enjoy new and less expensive means of transportation, accommodation, and other goods and services. With the increasing success comes an increasing headwind from the media, unions, and legislators, claiming negative impacts like precarious employment situations or the promotion of tax evasion. These circumstances provide an uncertain environment for researchers or practitioners developing new sharing services. Conducting a systematic literature review, a comprehensive overview of claimed positive and negative impacts of the Sharing Economy is given. Based on this overview, guidelines are derived that are supposed to help address these issues during the development of the new sharing services and underlying information systems

REPAINTING THE BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS FOR PEER-TO-PEER SHARING AND COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION

Sharing Economy businesses have become very popular recently but there is little guidance available on how to develop the respective business models. We faced this problem during a consortium research project for developing a service for electric vehicle charging that adopts the paradigm of Peer-to-Peer Sharing and Collaborative Consumption (P2P SCC)—a specific branch of the Sharing Economy. We use Action Design Research (ADR) to develop an adapted version of the Business Model Canvas that is specifically tailored to the needs of P2P SCC business model development. The adapted canvas is then applied to develop a business model for the proposed service. The learnings from the development process are formalized into a set of generally applicable guidelines for the development of P2P SCC business models. The resulting guidelines and the adapted canvas provide guidance for both researchers and practitioners who want to either develop new or analyze existing P2P SCC business models

Testing Technical Feasibility in CPS Development Projects

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are service systems that connect a product’s physical and computational elements through telecommunication networks. Typically, the processes in CPSs are executed on this physical and computational infrastructure. As the developing of new CPS is costly, testing and validating a CPS’s design at an early stage of development is desirable to avoid bad investments. The high development and potentially high hardware costs, however, make it difficult to create a full CPS prototype only for testing. This work uses Trkman’s critical success factors of business process management (BPM) as a theoretical lens and identifies “technical-feasibility fit” as an additional complementary success factor. Based on these factors, we develop a method for creating CPS testbeds that allow testing of CPSs at lower costs at an early stage of the development. We demonstrate the method’s application by a case in which we develop a testbed for an electric vehicle charging service

One Plug at a Time - Designing a Peer-to-Peer Sharing Service for Charging Electric Vehicles

The widespread diffusion of electric vehicles (EVs) suffers from the lack of a well-developed public charging infrastructure, which currently is une-conomical to develop for investors. Many owners of EVs have private charging stations at their premises, which yield unlockable potential due to high idling times. In line with sharing platforms for other goods like accommodations and cars, we present the design, prototypical implementation, and evaluation setting of CrowdStrom, a peer-to-peer sharing service for charging EVs that networks individuals, their charging stations, and charging service customers

A Market for Trading Used Electric Vehicle Batteries - Theoretical Foundations and Information Systems

Various automotive companies have demonstrated that used electric vehicle batteries (EVBs), after having been removed from electric vehicles (EVs) due to insufficient capacity or power, can still be repurposed as energy storage for stationary applications. If predictions on the diffusion of EVs prove true, a large amount of used EVBs will be available for repurposing until the end of this decade. As yet, the fundamental economic properties of a market for used EVBs are unexplored. Additionally, the role of information systems as enablers for second life business models and tools for trading used EVBs has not been investigated. Inspired by seminal economic theories and based on reviewing the market for used automotive parts, we offer a first conceptualization of three forms such a market might take, along with their economic properties and stakeholders. We subject these market forms to a conceptual transaction cost analysis and an empirical inquiry based on semi-structured interviews. We find that a market for used EVBs will likely emerge as an intermediary-based market that is supported by automobile companies. Against this backdrop, decision support systems seem to be a more suitable class of information systems than electronic marketplaces to enable the trading of used EVBs

A Method for Measuring User Preferences in Information Systems Design Choices

Information System Design (ISD) applies information technology to achieve desired ends in organizations and implies many technology choices to be made. A successful design of information systems addresses the different views of all its stakeholders in these decisions. If we consider that sub-part of an IS that is intended to assist in customer processes, a purposeful assessment of the preferences of this anonymous mass is needed. Methods of Human-Centered ISD are not sufficient in that case for that they require too close integration of the subjects; and state of the art preference measurement techniques are likely to be too time-consuming and cognitively challenging if the number of alternatives is large. Building on the Q-Methodology, originally developed to reveal subjectivity in psychology, we suggest a novel method for user preference measurement. We report on a case in which we failed by applying standard techniques for user measurement, but succeeded with Q-Sort. By means of an experiment we subsequently compare the mentioned methods and identify root causes for failure and success we experienced in the case, which for Q-Sort include short execution time, measuring many design choices at one time, satisfaction of the interviewees, and an effective IT support

New Service Development Through Action Design Research in Joint Research Projects

Information systems research on smart services receives numerous contributions that result from joint research projects. Such projects bring together researchers from academia and industry; both conducting applied research while developing marketable services. This paper contributes a conceptual meta- framework, which represents and describes joint research projects in service research based on the integration of previous conceptualizations. It combines the service marketing perspective of new service development (NSD) with the industry-academic collaboration perspective of action design research (ADR). The framework provides the entire IS community with a better understanding how joint research projects are conducted. Researchers that work in such projects can adopt the framework concepts and organize their projects accordingly. To demonstrate the framework’s application, we use the case of the development of a smart service in electric vehicle domain