Value-In-Context with Service Innovation in the Digital Age: A Service-Dominant Logic Perspective

The increasingly complex service context with the convergence of physical products, digitalization, and service offerings presents a major challenge for IS research on service innovation. This article addresses the resulting need for research on an adequate understanding of the perceived value of innovative digital services. It continues previous work that makes the first move in this regard—conceptualizing this value as the sum of direct value-in-context (S-D logic), and indirect and option value-in-context (both newly introduced). This article closes two research gaps. First, the option and indirect value-in-context components are clarified by developing propositions that link both to S-D logic’s main concepts of service innovation. Second, the value-in-context anatomy is empirically validated with two conjoint analyses. It can be shown that both newly introduced components of value-in-context indeed are decisive factors for customers’ perceptions of value with innovative digital services—implicating their conceptual separation

Towards an Understanding of Cyber-physical Systems as Industrial Software-Product-Service Systems

AbstractNew forms of solutions with a declined share of mechanics or hardware and instead an increased share of software and (software-enabled) services on the overall customer value proposition, so called cyber-physical systems (CPS), have been emerging for some time now. Current research highlights the underlying technical challenges but lacks a well-founded conceptualization for CPS that reflects its character as a software-enabled hybrid solution, consisting of software as well as of service and tangible product parts. The latter may facilitate research on CPS from a business-oriented and a customer value creation perspective rather than solely from a technical perspective. For this purpose, the present contribution proposes the conceptualization of the industrial software-product-service system. It is based upon empirical findings as well as theoretical considerations on the concept of industrial product-service systems and substantiated by suggested future research directions, derived with the help of the proposed conceptualization

How Do Consumers Evaluate Value Propositions of Connected Car Services?

The failure to clarify the value proposition, based upon a profound misunderstanding of different values that consumers attribute to connected car services, is the root cause of failed business models. Beyond practice, value propositions also play a central role in research on business models. Posing the research question of how consumers evaluate value propositions of connected car services, we address the research gap on value propositions in business models for the Connected Car. Informed by S-D logic, we conceptualize the perceived value on the consequence level and show empirically that consumers evaluate value propositions of connected car services not only in terms of their direct, but also in terms of their indirect and option value-in-context—both so far disregarded components of value-in-context

CPS Platform Approach to Industrial Robots: State of the Practice, Potentials, Future Research Directions

Approaches, such as Cloud Robotics, Robot-as-a-Service, merged Internet of Things and robotics, and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in production, show that the industrial robotics domain experiences a paradigm shift that increasingly links robots in real-life factories with virtual reality. However, despite the growing body of research to date, though insightful, the paradigm shift to CPS in industrial robotics remains an under-researched area. Findings from the present paper make several contributions to the current state of research: We provide a potentially reusable framework of analysis and apply this framework in order to reveal whether and to what extent the industrial robotics branch implements abilities and characteristics of CPS. We examine the top five industrial robot manufacturers ABB, Fanuc, Kawasaki, Kuka, and Yaskawa and identify considerable, current implementations. However, concerning one of three perspectives—the perspective on CPS as industry platform constructs, takes the industrial robotics branch only certain small steps towards CPS platforms. We discuss them and outline a set of business model patterns that can transform product innovations, enabled by abilities and characteristics of CPS, into business model innovations in the industrial robot domain. In order to enable the industry to exploit the full potential of industrial robots understood as CPS, we question the right degree of openness in the context of industry platform constructs. Our methodological approach combines conceptual with empirical research

MobiSys 2016

The 14th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2016) spanned a range of themes and domains, from smart environments to security and privacy. The highlights presented here cover the keynotes, paper sessions, and first Asian Students Symposium on Emerging Technologies

Changeable Manufacturing on the Network Level

AbstractAgility in the sense of changeability on the manufacturing network level, and here especially the business perspective, has received less attention than the other dimensions of changeability on the lower production levels, as well as in relation to the technological perspective. The present paper aims to enrich the concept of agility in the aforementioned sense, taking strategic management concepts into account that have so far received less attention in relation to changeability. Namely, we consider the concepts of lead factory, capacity pooling and allying, operational flexibility, and the concept of combining products, services and software as fruitful enrichments of the umbrella concept changeability. In so doing, we highlight interdependencies between agility and the analyzed concepts as well as the other changeability dimensions on the lower production level of factories or sites. On this basis, we formulate six hypotheses in consideration of the presented theoretical derivations. Hence, the methodological approach of our research is conceptual and hypothesis generating. Our work is supposed to build the basis for continuative conceptual and empirical research on agility

IoT Maps : Charting the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday environments. While the number of devices and the degree of connectivity is growing, it is striking that as a society we are increasingly unaware of the locations and purposes of such devices. Indeed, much of the IoT technology being deployed is invisible and does not communicate its presence or purpose to the inhabitants of the spaces within which it is deployed. In this paper, we explore the potential benefits and challenges of constructing IoT maps that record the location of IoT devices. To illustrate the need for such maps, we draw on our experiences from multiple deployments of IoT systems.Peer reviewe

Next generation analytics for open pervasive display networks

Public displays and digital signs are becoming increasingly widely deployed as many spaces move towards becoming highly interactive and augmented environments. Market trends suggest further significant increases in the number of digital signs and both researchers and commercial entities are working on designing and developing novel uses for this technology. Given the level of investment, it is increasingly important to be able to understand the effectiveness of public displays. Current state-of-the-art analytics technology is limited in the extent to which it addresses the challenges that arise from display deployments becoming open (increasing numbers of stakeholders), networked (viewer engagement across devices and locations) and pervasive (high density of displays and sensing technology leading to potential privacy threats for viewers). In this thesis, we provide the first exploration into achieving next generation display analytics in the context of open pervasive display networks. In particular, we investigated three areas of challenge: analytics data capture, reporting and automated use of analytics data. Drawing on the increasing number of stakeholders, we conducted an extensive review of related work to identify data that can be captured by individual stakeholders of a display network, and highlighted the opportunities for gaining insights by combining datasets owned by different stakeholders. Additionally, we identified the importance of viewer-centric analytics that use traditional display-oriented analytics data combined with viewer mobility patterns to produce entirely new sets of analytics reports. We explored a range of approaches to generating viewer-centric analytics including the use of mobility models as a way to create 'synthetic analytics' - an approach that provides highly detailed analytics whilst preserving viewer privacy. We created a collection of novel viewer-centric analytics reports providing insights into how viewers experience a large network of pervasive displays including reports regarding the effectiveness of displays, the visibility of content across the display network, and the visibility of content to viewers. We further identified additional reports specific to those display networks that support the delivery of personalised content to viewers. Additionally, we highlighted the similarities between digital signage and Web analytics and introduced novel forms of digital signage analytics reports created by leveraging existing Web analytics engines. Whilst the majority of analytics systems focus solely on the capture and reporting of analytics insights, we additionally explored the automated use of analytics data. One of the challenges in open pervasive display networks is accommodating potentially competing content scheduling constraints and requirements that originate from the large number of stakeholders - in addition to contextual changes that may originate from analytics insights. To address these challenges, we designed and developed the first lottery scheduling approach for digital signage providing a means to accommodate potentially conflicting scheduling constraints, and supporting context- and event-based scheduling based on analytics data fed back into the digital sign. In order to evaluate the set of systems and approaches presented in this thesis, we conducted large-scale, long-term trials allowing us to show both the technical feasibility of the systems developed and provide insights into the accuracy and performance of different analytics capture technologies. Our work provides a set of tools and techniques for next generation digital signage analytics and lays the foundation for more general people-centric analytics that go beyond the domain of digital signs and enable unique analytical insights and understanding into how users interact across the physical and digital world