Try Before You Buy: How to Design Information Systems to Enhance Consumer Willingness to Test Sustainable Innovations

More and more business organizations recognize the relevance of sustainable innovations as driving factor for their corporate strategies, products and processes. But while the concept of sustainability is generally ratified by employees and consumers, their willingness to actually use or buy such innovations can be low. One of the most important facilitators for the adoption of innovations is self-experience generated by testing the innovation. This paper provides insight on how sustainable innovation testing affects consumer mindsets and which barriers consumers face when considering testing a sustainable innovation. The study draws on the data from an in-depth interview study with seven providers and consumers of electric cars (as sustainable innovation) in business and private environments. Insights about the nature of consumer’s willingness to test are extracted and recommendations for the design and use of information systems as facilitators for testing sustainable innovations are derived

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM DESIGN TO OVERCOME RESISTANCE TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS

The concept of sustainability has been acknowledged as one of the central and most important issues of our time. However, technological innovations which provide a more sustainable way of living, for instance electric cars, are not always welcomed with open arms by consumers but often resisted at the beginning. As such, human resistance behavior can be explained as an interplay of different personality traits that favour the status quo. In this study, a decision support system design is introduced which bases on the concept of digital nudging that addresses innovation resistance on an individual’s cognitive level by de-biasing innovation trial decision-making. An experimental pre-study is conducted to test the influence of different DSS modifications on the selection of electric cars in an online rental car booking scenario. First results show that DSS which set sustainable innovations as default option have a significantly positive effect on their trial probability while priming consumers towards electric car trial has no significant effect

Overcoming Innovation Resistance beyond Status Quo Bias - A Decision Support System Approach (Research-in-Progress)

When innovative products and services are launched to the market, many consumers initially resist adopting them, even if the innovation is likely to enhance their life quality. Explanations for this behavior can also be found in specific personality traits and in general pitfalls of human decision-making. We believe that decision support systems (DSS) can help alleviate such innovation resistance. We propose a DSS design that addresses innovation resistance to complex innovations on an individual’s cognitive level. An experimental study will be conducted to test the influence of different DSS modifications on the perception and selection of complex innovations. We aim to identify levers for reducing innovation resistance and to derive DSS design implications.

White Spots in Business and IT: An Explorative Study for E-Mobility Services

E-mobility services are important enablers for the success of electric vehicles. In contrast to conventional mobility, where an ecosystem consisting of the vehicle and complementary services has been built up and has improved over decades, the ecosystem for e-mobility is far less advanced and still in its infancy. In order to get on the sustainable path to success in the steadily growing e-mobility market, innovative ideas are necessary which are not covered by existing service offerings. This paper therefore describes a study that explored opportunities for innovative e-mobility service business models through a systematic analysis. Furthermore, each e-mobility service depends on information technology (IT) support. Therefore, IT standardization is an important issue to consider in order to build up more complex services on top of basic services and further advance the e-mobility ecosystem. Consequently, this paper presents results from a survey conducted with 27 e-mobility experts from Germany to help identify necessary standardization gaps in the context of e-mobility services. The paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by proposing a structured, repeatable method for identifying innovative business models and by offering insights into study results. In addition, gaps in the standardization of IT infrastructure that are important for the provision of existing e-mobility services are illustrated

NUDGED TO UNLOAD: APPLYING CHOICE ARCHITECTURE TO PREVENT COGNITIVE OVERLOAD OF PARTICIPANTS IN OPEN IDEA EVALUATION

Open idea evaluation is based on the vision of leveraging the crowd’s wisdom for screening and evaluation of early stage innovations. However, when being confronted with the task to evaluate a large number of idea proposals, cognitive capacity of participants in open idea evaluation is challenged. Given the diminishing effect of cognitive load on the ability to make elaborate deci-sions, this paper aims to answer the question of how to lower cognitive load of participants in open idea evaluation. Therefore, we leverage knowledge from research in choice architecture, a concept incorporating tools to influence decisions by the design of decision situations. We derive two design variations–partitioning of options and decision staging–and propose an experimental design for their evaluation in a laboratory experiment. With the proposed study, we aim to con-tribute to theory by combining knowledge from choice architecture with the design of crowdsourcing platforms. Consequently, we aim to provide novel insights into decision support for crowdsourced decision tasks