Fatemeh Nikayin

Collective action for mobile payment platforms

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted Mobile payment requires collective action between banks and telecom operators.A case study on cooperation between all major Dutch banks and operators is analyzed.Differing strategic objectives between banks and operators hinder collective action.Lack of leadership, authority and commitment hindered collective action.Realizing joint m-payment platforms for banks and operators is highly challenging. Mobile payment has long been discussed but has still not reached mass market in Western societies. Banks and telecom operators often struggle to develop platforms for authorization and authentication of mobile payment services. This paper analyses an in-depth case on collaboration between three major Dutch banks and three Dutch telecom operators who jointly developed a trusted service manager for mobile payment. Collective action theory and platform theory is combined to study the issues of collaboration and competition between banks and operators. We find that differing strategic objectives and interests, conflicts, lack of dependencies and governance issues led to dissolution of the mobile payment platform. These problems partly result from platform characteristics of openness to third parties, governance of relations with third parties and platform competition.

Collective action for a common service platform for independent living services

OBJECTIVE The paper aims to explain how and why organizations, providing assistive devices and related web services for elderly independent living services, might be willing to collaborate and to share their resources and data on a common service platform. METHOD A theoretical framework from literature on collective action theory, platform and business ecosystem concepts was developed to explain what factors influence inter-organizational collective action for a common service platform. The framework was tested in a case study of collaborative platform project for independent living services in Finland. Semi-structured interviews with the project managers and the decision makers of involved organizations were the primary source of data collection. RESULT Strikingly, interdependency among the organizations was not found to be important for collaboration in this case. Instead, we found that a central organization can play an important role in initiating, facilitating and encouraging collaboration among different parties. Moreover, we found more willingness for collaboration when the platform is aimed to be open to third-parties to complement the platform with additional services. CONCLUSIONS Strategies of the platform leader and openness of the platform towards third parties are the most important drivers for collective action between organizations offering independent living services. Establishing common service platforms for independent living services requires explicit attention to these inter-organizational issues.

Establishing a common service platform for smart living: challenges and a research agenda

The vision of smart living promises innovative services from providers in energy, healthcare, entertainment and surveillance sectors. While smart homes used to equal home automation, evolving ICT technologies now enable truly adaptive and intelligent services that are integrated in several industries. Sector-specific service platforms are emerging that provide basic intelligence for services. However, smart living services should not be constrained to a specific industry sector, and hence the service platforms should be easily accessible for service providers regardless of their industry. In addition, smart living services should not be constrained to residents within the home, but should take advantage of outdoors position information to open up a range of novel service concepts. Establishing such a vision of smart living involves various technological and organizational challenges. This paper gives an overview of the current service platforms for smart homes and positioning information. Based on this overview, we propose a research agenda for enabling smart living services. The two major issues are how to achieve collective action between players from multiple sectors in order to set up a common service platform, and how to design business models that allow adding GNSS-based positioning information to the service platform.

Opening Up the Smart Home: A Classification of Smart Living Service Platforms

Emerging technologies like sensors, mobile devices and internet-of-things enable a new range of smart home services that go beyond simple home automation. The service platforms, on which these services run, are highly disparate based on different technological as well as organizational architectures. In this paper, the authors adopt a platform perspective to classify 42 major currently offered smart living service platforms. The authors analyze the platforms along two dimensions: where the intelligence of the platform is located in the technological architecture i.e. at users premise, in the cloud, on the network or in between and openness of the platform toward third party service providers which has implications on potential network effects. The authors found that most platforms are located in the users home and are kept closed for third party service providers, while only a few cloud-centric, open platforms exists in the market. The authors argue that smart living provides an interesting avenue for studying platform concepts given the diversity of the organizational and technological arrangements of smart living platforms and the conflicting views in literature as to how openness and technical architecture impact innovativeness and viability.

What motivates small businesses for collective action in smart living industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study what motivates small businesses to engage in collective action, especially in high-tech industry. Design/methodology/approach – Application domain is smart living industry, in which installation companies offer ICT-enabled solutions for smart home services. A survey was conducted among 140 small/medium installation companies in smart living industry which are members of a major Dutch branch organization. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to model and analyse data from the survey. Findings – The paper found that different types of motivations do not significantly increase the collective orientation of small businesses. Moreover, the current involvement of small companies in smart living projects is not directly related to their collective orientation. Research limitations/implications – The lack of collaboration is resulting in market fragmentation and lack of technological interoperability. The paper advise policy makers to provide selective incen...

Designing Viable Multi-sided Data Platforms: The Case of Context-Aware Mobile Travel Applications

Advances in data semantification and natural language querying are enabling new generations of context-aware mobile applications. Such applications would rely on platforms that integrate heterogeneous sets of user data from a range of applications and systems. Designing these platforms is challenging as they should serve multiple user groups at the same time. In this paper, we analyze who should subsidize multi-sided data platforms that enable mobile context-aware travel applications. After analyzing the different user groups and revenue models, we assess end-user acceptance of these revenue models through a survey among 197 potential users. Results show that users willing to share data with app developers are more inclined to use data-driven mobile travel apps but are less inclined to pay for them. This paradoxical result explains why premium-pricing as well as data-monetization strategies can both be viable.