Consulting – a Creativity-Intensive Process? Insights from an Exploratory Case Study

Creativity is an important predecessor of any innovation and a competitive factor in many industries. However, only little is known about the management of business processes that are coined by creativity. The theory of managing creativity-intensive processes provides an analytical perspective for the understanding and management of these processes. Consulting processes, at first sight, seem non-creative but show strong parallels to creativity-intensive processes (CIP). In this paper we confirm the validity of the theory’s core concept and its properties with data from a multi-case study within the consulting industry. We contribute to the qualitative empirical validation of the TMCP and thus support the generalization of the theory. Moreover, the TMPC contains strategies that organizations can employ in order to manage CIPs. In showing that consulting processes are CIPs, these strategies can be transferred, as a practical contribution, to the management of consulting processes

Capitalizing on Social Media Analysis – Insights from an Online Review on Business Models

With the rise and proliferation of social media on the Internet, social media analysis is emerging as a new business model for software companies. The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic overview of different types of such business models. After developing a coding schema based on the business model, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 16 websites of companies that actively promote social media analysis to their clients. We identified three archetypes of business models in this area: specialist content analysts, social data and application integrator, and social media service provider. Future research can build on these insights in order to focus on designing or revising methods for social media analysis to realize either of these business models. Software companies can benefit from the results by positioning their own business models in this emerging market more thoughtfully

Business Modeling Needs Process-Orientation - Framework Development and Testing

Organizations have to continuously align their value propositions with changing market requirements. Business modeling is an established approach for capturing new business ideas that deliver value to customers. Business model frameworks are an instrument for structuring business models. However, existent frameworks disregard the process as central element of business models. Process-orientation in business modeling is potentially useful, since information from the business model may be seamlessly transformed to business operations. Furthermore, views of different organizational stakeholders may be naturally integrated in the process perspective. Hence, we propose the process-oriented business model framework Octoproz. We present its iterative development and apply Octoproz to a real-life scenario to exemplify and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. Results suggest that the application of Octoproz leads to a better understanding of the expected business process, more efficient project coordination, and improved alignment of stakeholder expectations

Much ado about nothing? Tracing the progress of innovations borne on enterprise social network sites

Enterprise social networks are organizationally bounded online platforms for users to interact with another and maintain interpersonal relationships. The allure of these technologies is often seen in intra-organizational communication, collaboration and innovation. How these technologies actually support organizational innovation efforts remains unclear. A specific challenge is whether digital content on these platforms converts to actual innovation development efforts. In this study we set out to examine innovation-centric content flows on enterprise social networking platforms, and advance a conceptual model that seeks to explain which innovation conveyed in the digital content will traverse from the digital platform into regular processes. We describe important constructs of our model and offer strategies for the operationalization of the constructs. We conclude with an outlook to our ongoing empirical study that will explore and validate the key propositions of our model, and we sketch some potential implications for industry and academia

Aligning Capabilities and Social Media Affordances for Open Innovation in Governments

In recent years the proliferation of a new technological evolution has aroused great interest from science and practice: social media. Subsuming different types of online applications where users can create, edit and share content, social media enables new forms of interaction with others. Organisations already recognise its relevance and start leveraging on it. Furthermore, organisations identify the role of service innovation as one major driver for economic growth and competitive advantage. Nevertheless, although social media affords organisations to interact with their customers, the potential for utilising it for improving their service innovation activities is almost unexploited yet. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a framework for supporting the use of social media affordances for service innovation. Its applicability is tested in the domain “government”. Based on theoretical constructs a conceptual analysis is presented, tested in a specific domain and supplemented by potential future research and implications for theory and practice

Digital social signal processing - theorectical underpinning and research agenda

Organizations make increasingly use of social media in order to compete for customer awareness and improve the quality of their goods and services. Multiple techniques of social media analysis are already in use. Nevertheless, theoretical underpinnings and a sound research agenda are still unavailable in this field at the present time. In order to contribute to setting up such an agenda, we introduce digital social signal processing (DSSP) as a new research stream in IS that requires multi-facetted investigations. Our DSSP concept is founded upon a set of four sequential activities: sensing digital social signals that are emitted by individuals on social media; decoding online data of social media in order to reconstruct digital social signals; matching the signals with consumers’ life events; and configuring individualized goods and service offerings tailored to the individual needs of customers. We further contribute to tying loose ends of different research areas together, in order to frame DSSP as a field for further investigation. We conclude with developing a research agenda

Evaluating Business Modeling Tools from a Creativity Support System Perspective – Results from a Focus Group in the Software Development Industry

Business modeling tools provide IT support in the complex process of business modeling. Little research exists on the evaluation of business modeling tools. We interpret business modeling as a creative process and evaluate a specific business modeling tool (OctoProz) by assessing its potential for fostering creative performance. We draw on literature on the design of creativity support systems, that is, the components for collaborative idea development, and position our business modeling tool as a creativity support system. We conduct a focus group study in the software development industry, collecting qualitative data on creativity-specific tool properties of OctoProz: playfulness, comprehension, specialization, and collaboration. The results show that task-specificity of the tool was highly appreciated by the business modeling experts, while improvements are needed with regards to playful interaction with the business model and support of comprehension of the business model. Real-time collaboration in the modeling process over-satisfies the experts’ needs. Our findings contribute to the purposeful design of business modeling tools. Further, the results suggest that the components for collaborative idea development are valid, while aspects of GUI design and collaboration modes require further attention. We finally indicate limitations and future research directions