Understanding Business Process Evolution in Digital Ventures

Business processes are at each company\u27s core and must be adapted permanently to react to changing markets, substantial growth, or legal regulations. Especially digital ventures have the potential to evolve fast, and consequently, their business processes need to change at the same speed. Two streams of literature have looked into this. Traditional business process management sees business processes, once implemented, as relatively stable. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship literature highlights the inherent flexibility of digital ventures. Based on a multiple case study of five digital ventures, we analyze how entrepreneurs deal with this tension when business processes evolve. Building on entrepreneurial bricolage, we propose two types of resource recombination that we find, namely, usage of existing private resources and re-configuring of resources already being used within the venture. These insights contribute to extending our understanding of the evolution of business processes

On the Potential of Business Process Management for Digital Entrepreneurship: Findings from a Literature Review

Digital ventures face significant organizational challenges when scaling, including increasing sales and employee numbers, that withdraw resources from working on their market offerings. While digital entrepreneurship literature stresses the importance of creating processes that balance structure and flexibility to deal with these challenges, business process management (BPM) literature focuses on improving pre-designed business processes. We reconcile these perspectives in a structured literature review to explore how BPM can support digital venturing. We identify synergies and tensions between BPM and digital entrepreneurship and propose three avenues for future research. These include exploring ambidextrous BPM in digital ventures, treating digital venturing as a business process, and developing capabilities for balancing flexibility and structure. We contribute to information systems research by critically reviewing the literature on BPM and digital entrepreneurship and providing potential areas for future investigation

Rapid prototyping modules for remote engineering applications

This contribution describes a concept for an integration of microcontroller- and FPGA-based Rapid Prototyping modules into a Remote Lab system and its implementation. The implementation enables a Web-based access to control electro-mechanical models. The electromechanical models can be controlled by different platforms (microcontroller or FPGA-based) Students have the possibility to test a designed control algorithm directly within a hardware environment by uploading a source file to the Remote Lab server. That way the students can compare architectures of different control-platforms as well as different design approaches to control electro-mechanical models. The paper starts with an introduction into the design process and describes the tool set, which is provided to the students. After that the different platforms and their integration in the Web-server are introduced. Finally we would like to give examples of such complex design tasks and show, how the students can use different tools during several design steps

Gift: an integrated development and training system for finite state machine based approaches

At the Ilmenau University of Technology’s “Integrated Communication Systems” Department a main teaching concept deals with the design of digital control systems. Different lectures from the 1st to the 8th semester are using Finite State Machines (FSM) as a specification technique to realize different design tasks. During undergraduate studies the basics of Finite State Machines and their usage within the design of digital control systems are taught. To conceptualize more complex digital systems, as required in higher courses, it is necessary to use powerful toolsets. One example of such a toolset is the GIFT (Graphical Interactive Finite State Machine Toolset) system, developed by the Integrated Communications System Group at the Ilmenau University of Technology. With this toolset we want to extent our remote lab GOLDi and implement new techniques for a web-based development system for Finite State Machines

Kinetic Analysis of the Uptake and Release of Fluorescein by Metal-Organic Framework Nanoparticles

Metal-organic framework nanoparticles (MOF NPs) are promising guest-host materials with applications in separation, storage, catalysis, and drug delivery. However, on- and off-loading of guest molecules by porous MOF nanostructures are still poorly understood. Here we study uptake and release of fluorescein by two representative MOF NPs, MIL-100(Fe) and MIL-101(Cr). Suspensions of these MOF NPs exhibit well-defined size distributions and crystallinity, as verified by electron microscopy, dynamic light scattering, and X-ray diffraction. Using absorbance spectroscopy the equilibrium dissociation constants and maximum numbers of adsorbed fluorescein molecules per NP were determined. Time-resolved fluorescence studies reveal that rates of release and loading are pH dependent. The kinetics observed are compared to theoretical estimates that account for bulk diffusion into NPs, and retarded internal diffusion and adsorption rates. Our study shows that, rather than being simple volumetric carriers, MOF-NPs are dominated by internal surface properties. The findings will help to optimize payload levels and develop release strategies that exploit varying pH for drug delivery

MOF nanoparticles coated by lipid bilayers and their uptake by cancer cells

Supramolecular templating techniques have been widely used to direct the formation of porous materials with the goal of introducing permanent mesoporosity. While surfactant-directed self-assembly has been exploited for inorganic materials such as titania, silica, organosilica, and zeolites, it has rarely been applied to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and coordination polymers. Here we introduce a new family of gemini surfactant-directed zinc imidazolates, referred to as mesostructured imidazolate frameworks (MIFs), and present a detailed study on the influence of different gemini-type surfactants on the formation mechanism and structures of the resulting zinc imidazolates. The proposed formation mechanism for MIF-type materials involves co-assembly and crystallization processes that yield lamellar mesostructured imidazolate frameworks. Understanding and controlling such processes also has implications for the syntheses of microporous zinc imidazolate framework (ZIF) materials, whose formation can be suppressed in surfactant-rich solutions, whereas formation of MIF materials is favored in the presence of surfactants and triggered by the addition of halogenides. Solid-state 2D 13C1H HETCOR NMR measurements on prototypic CTAB-directed MIF-1 establish that the head group moieties of the surfactant molecules interact strongly with the zinc-imidazolate-bromide sheets. Additionally, the NMR analyses suggest that MIF-1 has a significant fraction of surfactant molecules that are interdigitated between the zinc-imidazolate-bromide sheets with an antiparallel stacking arrangement, consistent with the high thermal and chemical stability of the MIF hybrid materials

Using interactive hybrid online labs for rapid prototyping of digital systems

The Ilmenau Interactive Hybrid Online Lab offers several fields of application. In this article an enhancement of the existing Online Lab will be described to provide additional functionalities for a Web-based rapid prototyping of digital systems as well as the Web-based verification of such systems. For this new operation mode of the online lab a special rapid-prototyping board for digital systems was developed to fulfill the design tasks of digital systems. All the components of the rapid prototyping board will be described in detail. The implemented online lab infrastructure allows to interconnect online labs and to exchange remote lab experiments among different universities worldwide

Fields of applications for hybrid online labs

Based on a grid concept of an interactive hybrid online laboratory we will describe different fields of applications in different learning scenarios. The infrastructure is based on a universal grid concept which guaranties a reliable, flexible as well as robust usage of this online lab. By using the online lab, students are able to design control algorithms with different specification techniques to control electro-mechanical models in the online lab. Additionally, the reconfigurable rapid prototyping platform of the REAL system can be used to test all the taught topics of a given lectures in the field of digital system design. Finally, a special demonstration platform (a ball in a labyrinth on a balance plate) can be used to give the students a better feeling about the possibilities and limitations of remote control and observation via Internet and to evaluate these technologies critically. The implemented online lab infrastructure is based on the iLab architecture of the MIT, which allows to interconnect online labs and to exchange remote lab experiments among different universities worldwide