David Antons

Seamless Service? On the Role and Impact of Service Orchestrators in Human-Centered Service Systems

How can value cocreation in complex human-centered service systems (HCSSs) like health care be facilitated? We address this question by introducing the novel role of service orchestrators as dedicated actors who facilitate and orchestrate resource integration, and thereby value cocreation, between other interdependent actors in HCSSs. Specifically, we draw on findings from four complementary studies that investigate the role and impact of case managers, an ideal-typical service orchestrator in health care, through the perspectives of HCSS actors (i.e., patients in Study 1 and clinical staff in Study 2) and structures (i.e., clinical departments in Studies 3 and 4). Our findings indicate that orchestrating value cocreation through case managers enhances patient satisfaction as well as the financial and operational performance of clinical departments. Service orchestration also increases the perception of clinical staff that patients are actively involved in the cocreation of their own health service but surprisingly not that of patients themselves. As such, introducing service orchestrators might contribute to reconciling the growing tension between the quality and cost of health care. We conclude by outlining how our work serves as a possible starting point for a novel research stream on effective coordination mechanisms for value cocreation in complex HCSSs.

Big Data, Big Insights? Advancing Service Innovation and Design With Machine Learning:

Service innovation is intertwined with service design, and knowledge from both fields should be integrated to advance theoretical and normative insights. However, studies bridging service innovation and service design are in their infancy. This is because the body of service innovation and service design research is large and heterogeneous, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for any human to read and understand its entire content and to delineate appropriate guidelines on how to broaden the scope of either field. Our work addresses this challenge by presenting the first application of topic modeling, a type of machine learning, to review and analyze currently available service innovation and service design research (n = 641 articles with 10,543 pages of written text or 4,119,747 words). We provide an empirical contribution to service research by identifying and analyzing 69 distinct research topics in the published text corpus, a theoretical contribution by delineating an extensive research agenda consisting of four research directions and 12 operationalizable guidelines to facilitate cross-fertilization between the two fields, and a methodological contribution by introducing and demonstrating the applicability of topic modeling and machine learning as a novel type of big data analytics to our discipline.

Fighting MRSA Infections in Hospital Care: How Organizational Factors Matter.

OBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bloodstream infections at the level of the hospital organization. DATA SOURCES Data from all 173 acute trusts in the English National Health Service (NHS). STUDY DESIGN A longitudinal study based on trust-level panel data for the 5-year period from April 2004 to March 2009. Fixed effects negative binominal and system generalized method of moment models were used to examine the effect of (i) patient mix characteristics, (ii) resource endowments, and (iii) infection control practices on yearly MRSA counts. DATA COLLECTION Archival and staff survey data from multiple sources, including Public Health England, the English Department of Health, and the Healthcare Commission, were merged to form a balanced panel dataset. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS MRSA infections decrease with increases in general cleaning (-3.52 MRSA incidents per 1 standard deviation increase; 95 percent confidence interval: -6.61 to -0.44), infection control training (-3.29; -5.22 to -1.36), hand hygiene (-2.72; -4.76 to -0.68), and error reporting climate (-2.06; -4.09 to -0.04). CONCLUSIONS Intensified general cleaning, improved hand hygiene, additional infection control training, and a climate conducive to error reporting emerged as the factors most closely associated with trust-level reductions in MRSA infections over time.

Talk to Your Crowd

OVERVIEW: When crowdsourcing intermediaries lose crowd members, they lose potential high-quality solutions in the future. As the number of contests and intermediaries grows, it is increasingly critical for crowdsourcers to meet the needs of solvers and avoid seeing them migrate to the competition. Besides winning contests, intensive communication and customized feedback are solvers’ most central needs. For this study, we surveyed 202 solvers about the importance of communication in crowdsourcing contests. Based on our quantitative and qualitative insights, we derive key principles that can help crowdsourcers maintain and grow their solver base.

Talk to Your Crowd: Principles for Effective Communication in Crowdsourcing

OVERVIEW: When crowdsourcing intermediaries lose crowd members, they lose potential high-quality solutions in the future. As the number of contests and intermediaries grows, it is increasingly critical for crowdsourcers to meet the needs of solvers and avoid seeing them migrate to the competition. Besides winning contests, intensive communication and customized feedback are solvers’ most central needs. For this study, we surveyed 202 solvers about the importance of communication in crowdsourcing contests. Based on our quantitative and qualitative insights, we derive key principles that can help crowdsourcers maintain and grow their solver base.

The Social Value of Information Technology: How IT Investments Enhance Hospital Reputation

We expand IT payoff research by shedding light on the social value of IT with a particular focus on the reputational impact of IT investments. We examine mediating mechanisms that link IT investmen...

Content, Contribution, and Knowledge Consumption: Uncovering Hidden Topic Structure and Rhetorical Signals in Scientific Texts:

Knowledge production and scientific discourse are observable in published scholarly texts. Citations capture knowledge consumption and impact. Drawing from the sociology of science, our theoretical framework posits scientific communities as thought collectives with distinctive thought styles that embed a hidden topic structure and rhetorical signals into a journal’s published articles. We hypothesize and uncover how an article’s topic attributes (structure, focus, and newness) and rhetorical attributes (inclusiveness, exclusiveness, tentativeness, and certainty) are related to future knowledge consumption. We empirically test our ideas by applying text mining algorithms to model topics and extract rhetorical signals from 1,646 strategy articles composed of nearly 18 million words generating 172,237 citations over 35 years. We find that strategy articles’ hidden topic structure explains 14% of variance in scientific impact. We also show that topic focus and topic newness each independently, directly, and significantly increase impact. As for newness, the first two articles published on a new topic each generate a citation premium >100%, which is higher within the focal thought collective than outside. Importantly, we find that the citation premium of newness increases with greater topic focus (which attracts attention) and greater inflow of prior intracollective knowledge (which enhances absorption). Impact also increases when authors present new topics using a rhetorical style that is more tentative than certain. Overall, our findings demonstrate that topic and rhetorical attributes, as constitutive elements of scientific content, are independently and interdependently related to the consumption of strategy articles across thought collectives in management research.

Talk to Your Crowd: Principles for Effective Communication in Crowdsourcing: A Few Key Principles for Communicating with Solvers Can Help Contest Sponsors Maintain and Grow Their Base of Participants

OVERVIEW: When crowdsourcing intermediaries lose crowd members, they lose potential high-quality solutions in the future. As the number of contests and intermediaries grows, it is increasingly critical for crowdsourcers to meet the needs of solvers and avoid seeing them migrate to the competition. Besides winning contests, intensive communication and customized feedback are solvers’ most central needs. For this study, we surveyed 202 solvers about the importance of communication in crowdsourcing contests. Based on our quantitative and qualitative insights, we derive key principles that can help crowdsourcers maintain and grow their solver base.

Giving Voice to All Patients : On Patients at the Margins and their Intention and Perceived Ability to Complain

Background: It is now widely established that health care organizations are well advised not only to identify and act upon the concerns of all patient groups but also to encourage and enable them to voice their concerns in the first place. That said, research has begun to reveal that patients differ substantially in their readiness to complain, with many deciding to remain silent even after experiencing severe adverse events. Little research has explored whether patients at the margins (e.g., elderly, disabled, or mentally ill patients) are more likely to remain silent. Purpose: We examined the extent to which patients’ social (being elderly or poorly educated), physical (having a permanent impairment such as deafness, blindness, or a chronic physical condition), and mental marginality (having a mental illness or learning disability) is associated with their intention and perceived ability to complain. Methodology: We matched survey and patient record data for hospital inpatients treated in the English National Health Service in 2007. We then computed two-stage probit selection models to estimate the cross-sectional association between patients’ social, physical, and mental marginality and their intention (Stage 1, N1 = 58,062) and perceived ability to complain (Stage 2, N2 = 3,765). Findings: Only 6.47% of all patients intended to complain. Of these, only 10.41% indicated that hospital staff provided them with all the information they needed to complain. An additional 14.70% reported to have received at least some of the information needed for this purpose. Patients above 80 not only exhibited significantly lower intentions to complain than their mid-aged counterparts (−1.16%) but also felt considerably less well informed to file a complaint (−5.45%). Similarly, patients suffering from blindness or a severe vision impairment showed a significantly lower perceived ability to complain (−5.20%). Practice Implications: Patients at the margins, especially elderly patients and those with a severe vision impairment, will often remain silent and require special attention, if health care organizations are to listen to—and learn from—the voices of all patients. Our results indicate the need for inclusive complaint procedures designed to fuel organizational learning. Dedicated roles such as case managers and complaint officers might help to make such feedback channels accessible to all patients.

Innovationsmanagement in der Energiebranche – Anwendung des Open- Innovation-Ansatzes

Das Hervorbringen von innovativen Produkten und Dienstleistungen wird zunehmend zur Voraussetzung, um im heutigen Marktgeschehen zu bestehen. Die wesentliche Herausforderung besteht darin, Kunden und Nutzern derartige Leistungen anzubieten, dass diese ihre Anforderungen moglichst optimal befriedigt sehen. Dazu ist es erfolgskritisch, genau zu wissen, welche Bedurfnisse der Markt bzw. die Kunden haben. Dabei geht es vor allem um die Identifikation latenter, d. h. impliziter Bedurfnisinformation, die bei Umsetzung in passende Produkte oder Leistungen Differenzierungsvorteile ergeben konnen. Ebenso wichtig ist die Kenntnis aktueller technologischer Entwicklungen und Moglichkeiten, mit denen Leistungsangebote erstellt werden konnen. Hier bedeuten die zunehmende Technologiedynamik und Relevanz verschiedenster Technologiefelder fur die eigenen Leistungsangebote ein Umdenken.