'License to VIT’ - A Design Taxonomy for Visual Inquiry Tools

Visual Inquiry Tools are valuable assets to work conjointly on an ill-structured or wicked problem and solve it creatively. With visual inquiry tools, designers can sketch the problem-space of an artifact-to-be-designed and generate solutions in a priori defined ontological elements. While there exists guidance in how visual inquiry tools should be designed content-wise, there is a lack of clarification on the design options available to design them. Subsequently, the paper proposes a taxonomy of visual inquiry tools outlining options for their design. We do this by incorporating a sample of 24 visual inquiry tools developed in the scientific literature corpus as well as 15 through empirical example

Perceptions of Green User Entrepreneurs’ Performance - Is Sustainability an Asset or a Liability for Innovators?

User entrepreneurs rely on regular consumers when starting their business, for example, when raising creative and financial support. This research examines regular consumers’ opinions with regard to the future business performance of green vs. non-green user entrepreneurs. We build on previous consumer behavior research on consumers’ performance perceptions. Specifically, consumers perceive products that use green, environmentally friendly technologies as having inferior performance compared to products that use traditional technologies. We investigate whether this so called “sustainability liability” effect can also be found in consumers’ perceptions of green user entrepreneurs’ performance. We ran an online scenario experiment with regular consumers who assessed the business performance of several (green vs. non-green) user entrepreneurs. Results reveal a “sustainability asset” effect for perceptions of green user entrepreneurs, such that consumers with strong environmental values perceived the business performance of green user entrepreneurs as superior compared to non-green user entrepreneurs. Consumers with weak environmental values perceived green and non-green entrepreneurs as equally performant. We discuss possible explanations of our findings. Furthermore, we propose potential consequences of our results both for consumers’ intentions to support user entrepreneurs as well as for user entrepreneurs’ motivation to engage in green innovations

Analyzing and Evaluating today’s Power of Open Source: The Open Source Value Canvas

The drastically progressing digitalization of society and economy shines a new light on the open-source paradigm. Previously, open-source was merely a developer paradigm to share code openly and make it available to others. However, given the need for innovation and optimization, companies can leverage open-source components to use out of the box, build services on top, or replace commodifiable services. Subsequently, there is great potential to create new value in companies using open-source components. To assist companies and researchers in achieving this, the paper presents the Open Source Value Canvas for companies’ collaborative and interdisciplinary identification of open-source value. It particularly aims at analyzing and aligning the open-source potentials from the business and IT perspectives. We draw on rich insights from an ongoing research project providing tailored open-source components for the European logistics sector

Employee’s Acceptance of Process Innovations: An Action Research Approach

Organizational changes are becoming more and more important due to increasing competition and rapid technological evolution. However, the intended benefits of organizational changes depend strongly on how effectively process innovations are implemented within an organization. Hereby, the management of the employee’s acceptance is considered as one of the most critical tasks in change management projects. Normally, employee acceptance is evaluated using theory-based acceptance models. We start by reviewing the existing process innovation-related acceptance models. In a next step, we describe a new model, called DART, which is based on the idea of the balanced scorecard, using a meta-structure in order to identify a balanced set of individually measurable acceptance criteria. Guided by an action research approach, we further describe a case example showing the application of DART in a process reengineering project. We close our paper by reviewing the consequences of our research, as well as the suitability of DART in the research context. The results presented in this paper are expected to have important implications for both, researchers who should benefit from a very flexible acceptance model as well as managers and process designers who should gain valuable insights for their change implementation efforts

Transformer(s) of the Logistics Industry - Enabling Logistics Companies to Excel with Digital Platforms

Platformization is a prevailing trend that changes industries at their core. The rise and dominance of platform-based companies require incumbent companies and start-ups to rethink how they approach that novel challenge and leverage its full potential. To successfully steer and initiate this digitally enabled industry transformation, even in traditional industries like logistics, the incumbent companies require IT and specific platform design support. However, designing a digital platform is a complex task riddled with design options, potential pitfalls, and complex underlying mechanisms. Consequently, research and practice require tools to leverage past design knowledge and generate digital platforms in a goal-oriented fashion. This paper addresses precisely that issue as we report on a design science research study that developed a visual inquiry tool for digital platform design. Ultimately, the visual inquiry tool provides researchers and practitioners with the means to develop digital platforms more efficiently and strategically

Curbing customer-to-customer misbehavior contagion in the sharing economy

The sharing economy has fundamentally transformed customers’ lives. Providing short-term access to resources, however, creates environments in which customers regularly become the target of other customers’ misbehavior, either personally or toward shared resources. Although this customer-to-customer (C2C) misbehavior is known to be contagious, the reasons for its spread and the effectiveness of containment measures across sharing economy markets remain unclear. Three experiments reveal the moderating role of on-site supervision: platform-provider-directed blame attributions drive C2C misbehavior contagion in settings with formal on-site supervision, while social norms underlie contagion when on-site supervision is absent. Perpetrator-directed blame attributions reverse contagion irrespective of on-site supervision. More intrusive platform and peer-provider measures (in-person reprimands, in-app messages, and photo features) are most effective at curbing contagion by reducing social norms to misbehave and shifting blame to the perpetrator. However, these measures are only effective at certain C2C misbehavior severity levels for different sharing economy market types

High resolution heat atlases for demand and supply mapping

Significant reductions of heat demand, low-carbon and renewable energy sources, and district heating are key elements in 100% renewable energy systems. Appraisal of district heating along with energy efficient buildings and individual heat supply requires a geographical representation of heat demand, energy efficiency and energy supply. The present paper describes a Heat Atlas built around a spatial database using geographical information systems (GIS). The present atlas allows for per-building calculations of potentials and costs of energy savings, connectivity to existing district heat, and current heat supply and demand. For the entire building mass a conclusive link is established between the built environment and its heat supply. The expansion of district heating; the interconnection of distributed district heating systems; or the question whether to invest in ultra-efficient buildings with individual supply, or in collective heating using renewable energy for heating the current building stock, can be based on improved data