A Bottom-up E-Participation Process: Empowering Citizens to Innovate the Public Administration and its Sphere of Influence

Citizen participation procedures are increasingly used as a democratic instrument in political processes. While e-government development is slowly producing digitized solutions for implementation, there is potential for involving citizens in innovation processes in public administration. Currently, such operations are initiated reactively by the public sector in response to problems for which solutions are pursued. With a structured innovation process, the creativity of citizens can be used participatory to further develop the public administration and its services proactively, i.e., without a specific problem background. This paper describes current characteristics of e‑participation and open innovation based on related literature and discusses their use for a proactive, bottom-up public innovation process. Furthermore, Business Process Model & Notation (BPMN) is used to illustrate a simple conceptual process for contributing and assessing ideas supported by an idea management system

Creating Common Ground: Formalizing and Designing Employee-driven Innovation Processes with Decision Points

Striving for innovation and advancement, a phenomenon can be observed wherein organizations are progressively incorporating their \u27ordinary\u27 employees into the innovation process, capitalizing on their creativity, expertise, and knowledge to foster novel ideas. Such integration mandates formalized yet flexible processes to offer a common ground for both employees as idea contributors and managers as decision-makers, enabling control and governance. Despite this, a conspicuous knowledge gap exists within the realm of employee-driven innovation (EDI) concerning the design of EDI processes. In this paper, we present the outcomes of an action design research project conducted with a medium-sized organization, focusing on formalizing and designing an EDI process with decision points through three iterative cycles. This research contributes fourteen meta-requirements and eleven design principles for EDI process design, thereby expanding the theoretical (prescriptive) knowledge base. Additionally, the results offer practical implications, enabling organizations to adopt the EDI process accordingly

Overview of Licensing Platforms based on Distributed Ledger Technology

The licensing of creative work is of broad and current interest. The European Commission proposes that when uploading a licensed digital work, the uploader should be checked by the system that one has the necessary rights. Technically this law is difficult to implement, as images with different intentions are shared, and even small changes like watermarks make it difficult to reveal similarities. The characteristics of distributed ledger technology could provide excellent support for the licensing and management of the rights of use. In this work, non-technical and technical criteria are defined to achieve an overview of the state-of-the-art solutions in the field of blockchain-based licensing platforms. Based on the criteria, different licensing platforms are reviewed, and the results are presented in a comparison matrix

Unfolding Effect Areas of Employee-driven Innovation: A Systematic Literature Review

Over recent years, employee-driven innovation (EDI) has emerged as a prominent topic in both practical and academic circles. Particularly in economic-oriented organizations seeking growth, there is an increasing trend to involve “ordinary” employees—those whose primary responsibilities do not traditionally include innovation tasks—in the innovation process. These employees are tapped for their creativity and experience in the hope that they will generate innovative ideas beneficial to the organization. Consequently, EDI is increasingly acknowledged as a significant source of competitive edge, with employees often seen as initiating innovators that complement traditional channels, such as formal research and development departments. Despite the growing body of research in the interdisciplinary field of EDI and the interplay of multiple perspectives and effect areas, a comprehensive overview remains elusive. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review to expose the vast effect areas of EDI, focusing on the micro (employee) and meso (organizational) levels. We identified four effect areas at the micro-level and seven at the mesolevel. Our research enhances the understanding of the multi-layered components of EDI and provides insights and implications for academics and practitioners aiming to harness its potential

A Review on Blockchain Technology and Blockchain Projects Fostering Open Science

Many sectors, like finance, medicine, manufacturing, and education, use blockchain applications to profit from the unique bundle of characteristics of this technology. Blockchain technology (BT) promises benefits in trustability, collaboration, organization, identification, credibility, and transparency. In this paper, we conduct an analysis in which we show how open science can benefit from this technology and its properties. For this, we determined the requirements of an open science ecosystem and compared them with the characteristics of BT to prove that the technology suits as an infrastructure. We also review literature and promising blockchain-based projects for open science to describe the current research situation. To this end, we examine the projects in particular for their relevance and contribution to open science and categorize them afterwards according to their primary purpose. Several of them already provide functionalities that can have a positive impact on current research workflows. So, BT offers promising possibilities for its use in science, but why is it then not used on a large-scale in that area? To answer this question, we point out various shortcomings, challenges, unanswered questions, and research potentials that we found in the literature and identified during our analysis. These topics shall serve as starting points for future research to foster the BT for open science and beyond, especially in the long-term

ICT Application Types and Equality of E-Participation - A Systematic Literature Review

In the course of the digitization of governments (e-government), the area of electronic participation (e-participation) has developed into an essential pillar for the joint democratic shaping of politics and domestic countries with the involvement of citizens. For creating a channel for interaction, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used to bring citizens and government together in the digital space through the Internet, nearly independent of time and location. This communication gives citizens the chance to participate and the government to hear its citizens, especially in a decision-making process. Over the last decade, the e-participation space has grown and evolved as a phenomenon and has itself created problems and challenges in its implementation. This paper uses a systematic literature review to provide an overview of which overarching ICT application types are prevalent and the extent to which citizen inclusion and equality are observed in their use