A Consumer Perspective on Mobile Service Platforms: A Conjoint Analysis Approach

Digital platforms need to attract both application developers and end users. Existing literature suggests various strategies related to openness, flexibility, and generativity to attract application developers. However, how consumers make decisions on adopting platforms has not been studied. This paper studies which characteristics of digital platforms consumers most prefer. We focus on mobile platforms where application stores, operator portals, and service provider platforms compete for the consumer’s attention. We conducted a conjoint analysis among 166 consumers to determine the most important characteristics of the mobile platforms. We found that application-related characteristics were most important, especially the number of available applications. Governance-related and technical characteristics were hardly important. Platform characteristics were considerably less important than the brand of the operating system linked to the platform. These findings were consistent between European and Chinese users, and between males and females. The study paves the way for IS scholars to integrate consumer perspectives in the provider-dominated discourse of digital platforms

Capturing Value from Mobile Business Models: Design Issues That Matter

Designing viable mobile business models that capture value for all organizations involved is challenging. A range of design issues could be considered, and it is often not clear how they ultimately impact the performance of the business model. This paper tests causal relations between design issues and success factors in the organization and finance domain of mobile business models, by analyzing a survey among 120 practitioners and experts in the mobile Internet services domain using structural equation modeling. We find that organizational design issues lead to more acceptable division of roles among actors, and that financial design issues impact more acceptable risks. However, profitability is influenced only indirectly by these design issues, as the relations are mediated through acceptable risks and role division. Our findings imply specific clues to organizations in the mobile domain on what design issues to address in order to satisfy specific success factors

Smart Home: Aligning Business Models and Providers Processes; A case survey

Smart Home projects require product, service and business model innovation by organizations from multiple sectors. A considerable number of Smart Home projects, however, fail to live up to expectations and to commercialize their services. Business models that enable these projects have to be viable and feasible for the project as a whole as well as for individual involved providers. Moreover, the processes of involved providers have to be aligned, and exchange of information and value has to be well defined. In this paper, we propose three alignment domains that address the operational interactions between the involved providers. Based on a case survey it can be concluded that insufficient attention is paid to the alignment of Business Model as well as to Business Processes between involved providers, who are an essential to service innovation in a value network

Business Model Dynamics: A Longitudinal, Cross-sectional Case Survey

To maintain alignment with technology, regulation and market developments in the outside world, companies need to adapt their business models over time. As most literature has studied business models in a static approach, understanding is lacking on how external forces drive internal business model design choices. This paper studies which type of external drivers are most influential throughout the life cycle of business models. To do so, we surveyed 45 longitudinal case descriptions on business model dynamics of (networks of) organizations in various domains. Our results partly support our hypotheses. Market and technology drivers are most relevant in early stages of new business models, while regulation is far less important than we expected. These results mainly apply to small start-ups rather than large, established companies

A process algebra with global variables

In standard process algebra, parallel components do not share a common state and communicate through synchronisation. The advantage of this type of communication is that it facilitates compositional reasoning. For modelling and analysing systems in which parallel components operate on shared memory, however, the communication-through-synchronisation paradigm is sometimes less convenient. In this paper we study a process algebra with a notion of global variable. We also propose an extension of Hennessy-Milner logic with predicates to test and set the values of the global variables, and prove correspondence results between validity of formulas in the extended logic and stateless bisimilarity and between validity of formulas in the extended logic without the set operator and state-based bisimilarity. We shall also present a translation from the process algebra with global variables to a fragment of mCRL2 that preserves the validity of formulas in the extended Hennessy-Milner logic.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2020, arXiv:2008.1241

Should Mobile Internet Services be an Extension of the Fixed Internet? Context-of-Use, Fixed-Mobile Reinforcement and Personal Innovativeness

Consumers can increasingly use mobile phones to carry out similar tasks as they do on the fixed Internet. Literature on reinforcement and displacement states that the use of new media depends on whether users are inclined to replace or reinforce their existing media use on a new device. This paper analyzes whether the importance that users attribute to using similar services on their mobile phone as on the fixed Internet can explain the intention to adopt mobile services. Specifically, we investigate if such fixed-mobile reinforcement attitude could mediate the impact of personal innovativeness and context-of-use on intention to adopt mobile services. We compare basic Internet services, entertainment services and transaction services. We find that especially the intention to adopt basic Internet services largely depends on the importance of using similar services in the mobile domain as on the fixed Internet. Several context-of-use predictors are partially or even fully mediated by our novel construct. The results convey a positive message to operators that are betting on converged multimedia services that can be accessed from any device and from any fixed or mobile network

Exoplanet Spectroscopy: The Hubble Case

The Hubble Space Telescope has recently emerged as the first telescope to detect molecular signatures in an exoplanet via infrared spectroscopy. Molecular spectroscopy of exoplanets is demanding and requires an accurate determination and removal of the instrument systematics. Here we report on our effort to extract accurate exoplanet spectra from NICMOS spectrophotometry. We developed a standardized and highly automated pipeline to remove instrument systematics based on our previous results. We tested the pipeline and find excellent agreement with observation specific implementations. The process of decorrelating instrument parameters from the measured time series is well understood, stable and guarantees reproducible results

Business model tooling: where research and practice meet

This special issue bundles a series of papers on business model tooling. Business model tools are methods, frameworks or templates to facilitate communication and collaboration regarding Business Model analysis, (re-)design, adoption, implementation and exploitation. In this introduction to the special issue, we position business model tooling in the broader literature, going beyond the mere use of tooling to disseminate academic knowledge. We point out the unique contributions on business model tooling that information systems scholars can bring. After giving an overview of business model tools and ontologies, we sketch a brief research agenda comprising seven research directions: (1) design of tooling; (2) interfaces and usability; (3) evaluation and testing; (4) adoption, diffusion and commercialization of tooling; (5) privacy and security of tool users; (6) the use of tooling in business model education; and (7) future tooling enabled by big data and machine learning.</p