Control Mechanisms for Assessing the Quality of Handmade and Artistic Products in e-Marketplace Platforms

Selling handmade and artistic goods online is challenging since buyers need to be able to assess product quality before purchase. This study aims to explore how control mechanisms aid the assessment of the product quality of handmade and artistic goods. We do so by extracting control mechanisms for e-marketplace platforms from existing literature and discussing to what extent these are suitable for handmade and artistic goods. We found that existing literature mainly focuses on reputation systems. We reshaped the findings by conducting desk research to identify how control mechanisms are applied in a number of e-marketplaces. Our results show that in e-marketplaces that focus on selling handmade artistic products, a reputation system is not sufficient to ensure product quality in an online environment. Thus, it is critical to apply other control mechanisms which are more effective in increasing the trustworthiness of the seller of artistic and handmade goods. Last, we also suggest alternative control mechanisms to be explored in future research

Rethinking consumers\u27 data sharing decisions with the emergence of multi-party computation: an experimental design for evaluation

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to share their personal data with businesses due to mounting concerns over privacy and control. Emerging privacy-enhancing technologies like multi-party computation (MPC), which allows generating insights while consumers retain data control, are challenging the current understanding of why consumers share their data. In this research-in-progress paper, we develop and evaluate an instrument and experimental design to investigate the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data and its antecedents. Preliminary analysis from a pre-study (N=300) indicates a good fit for our model. Also, MPC enhances consumers’ control and trust while reducing privacy concerns and risk, ultimately increasing data sharing willingness. The findings suggest that privacy-enhancing technologies significantly affect both the willingness to share data itself and its typical antecedents. The next step will conduct a large-scale online experiment using the developed instruments to evaluate further the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data

Designing business model tooling for business model exploration: An experimental design for evaluation

Disruptive technologies drive enterprises to rethink how to create and capture value by revising their business models (BM). Even in cases that the need for BM innovation is clear, how entrepreneurs can do it and what they need to be changed it is not always obvious. That leads to the need for BM exploration. BM tooling can support this process, however, existing BM tools are not widely focused on the BM exploration. In previous steps of our research, we designed and developed a digital tooling for BM exploration. This RiP paper presents the experimental design we plan to use to evaluate the effects of the tooling on the BM exploration. Initial results and future steps are discussed. We expect to contribute to the BM literature by understanding what features of BM tooling contribute to BM exploration

Action Design Research for Social Innovation: Lessons from Designing a Health and Wellbeing Platform

IT artifacts play an important role in solving societal problems and realizing social innovations. Existing practice-inspired design science research (DSR) approaches, such as Action Design Research (ADR), do not consider social innovation as an explicit starting point for design iterations. In this paper, we explore how social innovation as a starting point affects the ADR approach. By reflecting on a three-year long ADR project in the domain of health and wellbeing, we suggest four principles to extend the ADR approach: (1) Translate a societal problem into practical problems on a stakeholder-level; (2) Reciprocal shaping between social practices and the IT artifact; (3) Involve citizens early and throughout the project; and (4) Balance political, economic and societal values for evaluating ADR results

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

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

COLLECTIVE ACTION IN A SMART LIVING PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM: THE ROLE OF PLATFORM LEADERSHIP AND PLATFORM OPENNESS

The growing popularity of mobile and internet-based services is increasingly changing the vision of smart homes from simple home automation to advanced ICT services which are accessible everywhere. Many small and large vendors and service providers across different industries are becoming more aware of the remarkable prospects in the smart living domain. Accordingly, several services bundled with different service platforms are emerging in the market, aiming at providing elderly-care, energy management, security or entertainment services. The overwhelming number of service platforms (mostly with proprietary standards and technologies) has made this domain even more complex and doubtful for users. While collective action between actors for developing common service platforms may solve the complexity and foster adoption of these services, the challenges of cooperation hinder many actors from joint attempts. In this paper, we study how inter-organizational cooperation for developing a common service platform for smart living services emerges. Specifically, we study the influence of platform leadership and platform openness on collective action. We do so by conducting a single case study on a unique collaborative elderly-care platform development project in Finland. The case was critical as it had all the required conditions (i.e. collective action for a common platform development project in the smart living domain) to test our propositions. The results indicate the important role of a central actor or platform leader in promoting and coordinating collaboration, even in the absence of strong interdependency in the ecosystem. We also found that most of the parties are motivated to cooperate for an open industry standard platform instead of a proprietary standard platform to allow easy integration of other services and devices to the platform. However, only under certain rules, the parties open up the business ecosystem and cooperate with new companies

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

DO CONSUMERS CARE ABOUT MOBILE SERVICE PLATFORMS? A CONJOINT ANALYSIS ON CONSUMER PREFERENCE FOR MOBILE PLATFORMS

Literature on Mobile Platforms focuses predominantly on strategic issues in managing multi-sided platforms as well as economic issues of two-sided markets. Most of this literature is highly conceptual and empirical research on the perceptions, preferences and behaviour of consumers is lacking. Moreover, scholars typically focus on device-related platforms like operating systems and app stores, while platforms developed by mobile operators are seldom discussed explicitly. In this paper, we therefore aim to understand the criteria and expectations of consumers to opt for a specific platform from a device manufacturer or operator. To do so, we developed and executed a questionnaire for conjoint analysis. The data for the conjoint analysis was collected from 88 Chinese researchers and students. The conjoint results show that most respondents strongly prefer mobile operating systems provided by Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) over Nokia (Symbian) and BlackBerry OS. Moreover, application cost is considered to play an important role in the decision making of consumers to opt a platform. The findings of the study indicate that respondents hardly find the provider of the platform important, i.e. they prefer service provider and device provider platforms over operator platforms

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