Discontinuous Technological Change and Relaxations of Regulatory Restrictions to Achieve Societal Objectives for the Environment, with Focus on IP Protections

We address cases where improvements in information technology for measurement and monitoring should result in regulatory relaxation, in contrast with much recent research, which focuses on situations where these improvements should result in increased regulatory restrictions on the actions permitted by large platform operators. We focus specifically on the problem of reducing environmental degradation, and we explore how regulatory restrictions associated with intellectual property (IP) rights should be relaxed in the presence of demonstrable reductions in environmental impact that result from improvements made by parties other than the owners of the IP. We explore how Environmental Impact Merit should be used to compel the owner of the IP to adopt improvements and to compel compensation to the improver. Future research will develop additional examples where regulatory relaxation is appropriate

Essential Platform Infrastructure and the Need for Regulation

Digital platforms have become a ubiquitous phenomenon and sparked innovation in various industries. However, digital platforms have also raised concerns about competition, privacy, labor protection, democracy, and negative externalities. This is why platform regulation has gained significant attention from research and practice in recent years. Regulators face the challenge of predicting the importance of a new platform of investigation with limited resources and a growing platform economy. To address this challenge, we develop a framework building on infrastructural properties, platform properties, and the notion of essentiality. We derive the concept of essential platform infrastructure to determine the need for regulation. We propose that the degree of essentiality of a digital platform and its appropriation of infrastructural properties are two dimensions indicating the magnitude of potential damage that a platform can cause in case it abuses its power, thereby indicating an increased need for regulation

From Product Platform Ecosystem to Innovation Platform Ecosystem: An Institutional Perspective on the Governance of Ecosystem Transformations

Incumbent companies across industries such as banking, insurance, and enterprise software have begun transforming their existing product platform ecosystems into innovation platforms ecosystems to increase generativity in their ecosystems. Such ecosystem transformations not only entail technological challenges as the underlying platform technology changes but also organizational challenges in that ecosystem actors such as partners and customers need to become part of the transformed ecosystem. To study how incumbent companies can govern ecosystem transformations successfully, we interpret ecosystems as organizational fields and ecosystem transformations as changes to the fields’ institutional infrastructure. Based on a multiyear, grounded theory study of the transformation of SAP’s on-premises ERP system, we first identify institutionalization challenges that arise when institutional infrastructure is changed during an ecosystem transformation. We then show how field-level governance mechanisms address these challenges and how the new institutional infrastructure gains legitimacy among ecosystem actors, ultimately leading to the institutionalization of the transformed ecosystem. These findings contribute to the literature on ecosystem transformations and platform governance by highlighting the role that institutional forces play in ecosystem transformations. Furthermore, we add to the literature on institutional theory by providing insights into the dynamics of institutional infrastructure as it becomes infused with digital technologies

The Need to Revise Copyright Law to Reflect the Changing Costs and Benefits of Modern Digital Reuse of Artistic Creations

Copyright law has always sought to maximize the quantity of valuable creative works available to society. While protecting the creative artists is essential, it is in some sense incidental; the reason to protect the artist is that them, there would be nothing to copy. As new digital technologies for transforming artistic works gain in capability, the ease of producing innovative and valuable works based on the reuse of prior work increases, meaning that society can now benefit from an increased supply of works based on the reuse of others. This suggests that restrictions on reuse that were considered optimal in the past should now be relaxed. We suggest changes to copyright law to achieve this new optimum. We suggest that artistic merit should once again be considered relevant to copyright law, in this case to determine when artistic works should be permitted to reuse works still subject to copyright protection. We retain the concept of originality in deciding when works based on reuse should themselves be granted copyright

Governance of nonprofit platforms-Onboarding mechanisms for a refugee information platform

The number of refugees arriving in Europe has increased dramatically in 2015. While governments, initiatives, and volunteers have invested substantial effort into supporting refugees, an information deficit impedes the efficacy of this collaboration. Information platforms are used to tackle this information deficit. However, the onboarding process of information providers is a critical challenge for the platforms?overall success. On the basis of observations, interviews with information providers and user experience tests, we drafted a case study describing the governance strategies applied to establish a sustainable onboarding of information providers on a nonprofit information platform for refugees. Contributing to recent literature on platform governance, our results show that governance mechanisms are implemented differently for nonprofit platform ecosystems than for commercial platform ecosystems. Building on our results, we provide practical implications by deriving a platform governance strategy that supports a sustainable onboarding of information providers

Detecting Feature Requests of Third-Party Developers through Machine Learning: A Case Study of the SAP Community

The elicitation of requirements is central for the development of successful software products. While traditional requirement elicitation techniques such as user interviews are highly labor-intensive, data-driven elicitation techniques promise enhanced scalability through the exploitation of new data sources like app store reviews or social media posts. For enterprise software vendors, requirements elicitation remains challenging because app store reviews are scarce and vendors have no direct access to users. Against this background, we investigate whether enterprise software vendors can elicit requirements from their sponsored developer communities through data-driven techniques. Following the design science methodology, we collected data from the SAP Community and developed a supervised machine learning classifier, which automatically detects feature requests of third-party developers. Based on a manually labeled data set of 1,500 questions, our classifier reached a high accuracy of 0.819. Our findings reveal that supervised machine learning models are an effective means for the identification of feature requests

Developing an Industrial IoT Platform – Trade-off between Horizontal and Vertical Approaches

Demands for a digitalized, connected, and smart production provide a fertile ground for industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) platforms to arise within the manufacturing industry (e.g., Siemens Mind Sphere, AXOOM Smart Enterprise, FORCAM FORCE). Nevertheless, many companies struggle to successfully kick-off platform ecosystems. Information Systems (IS) literature is of limited help, because insights on managing platform ecosystems are mostly derived from successful examples in the business-to-consumer (B2C) context. To better understand the challenging situation of companies in the emerging IIoT environment, we conducted an in-depth case study at a prospective platform provider. Insights gained through interviews and engagement in the field uncovered a tension between a horizontal platform strategy and vertical integrated solutions as a central challenge for companies aiming to launch an IIoT-platform in the market. By conceptualizing this trade-off, its causes along with related benefits and challenges, we add to existing literature on platform governance and launch strategies

How digital solutions for the integration of refugees persist long-term: The interplay of a social cause and platform architecture

Digital solutions are considered to be an important component in efforts to support the integration of refugees. Given that refugees rely on digital technology to an unprecedented degree, many digital solutions that support refugees have been developed in Europe following the high influx of refugees in 2015. However, only a few of these solutions are still active today—even though there would still be a need for them. Despite several studies concerning the use of digital solutions, it remains unclear what the success factors of those solutions that succeed in the long term are. In this paper, we explore the case of Integreat, an information platform for refugees that was founded in Germany in 2015 and is still expanding today. To identify obstacles along Integreat’s path of long-term success and to understand how they were overcome, we applied a translation process lens grounded in actor–network theory, following actors through the stages of problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization during the implementation and roll-out of the digital platform. Our findings show that the long-term persistence of the Integreat platform builds on the formation of a network consisting of distinct groups of actors (core team, developer community, municipalities) that begin to act jointly as if they were a single actor. The social cause as a joint vision and the platform architecture as a facilitator strengthened the establishment and support of relationships in the network that enabled the Integreat platform. The study contributes to research on the long-term success of non-profit initiatives for the integration of refugees by emphasizing the role of social good and platform architecture