Ivo Blohm

Determinants of physicians’ technology acceptance for e-health in ambulatory care

BACKGROUND Germany is introducing a nation-wide telemedicine infrastructure that enables electronic health services. The project is facing massive resistance from German physicians, which has led to a delay of more than five years. Little is known about the actual burdens and drivers for adoption of e-health innovations by physicians. OBJECTIVE Based on a quantitative study of German physicians who participated in the national testbed for telemedicine, this article extends existing technology acceptance models (TAM) for electronic health (e-health) in ambulatory care settings and elaborates on determinants of importance to physicians in their decision to use e-health applications. METHODS This study explores the opinions, attitudes, and knowledge of physicians in ambulatory care to find drivers for technology acceptance in terms of information technology (IT) utilization, process and security orientation, standardization, communication, documentation and general working patterns. We identified variables within the TAM constructs used in e-health research that have the strongest evidence to determine the intention to use e-health applications. RESULTS The partial least squares (PLS) regression model from data of 117 physicians showed that the perceived importance of standardization and the perceived importance of the current IT utilization (p<0.01) were the most significant drivers for accepting electronic health services (EHS) in their practice. Significant influence (p<0.05) was shown for the perceived importance of information security and process orientation as well as the documentation intensity and the e-health-related knowledge. CONCLUSIONS This study extends work gleaned from technology acceptance studies in healthcare by investigating factors which influence perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of e-health services. Based on these empirical findings, we derive implications for the design and introduction of e-health services including suggestions for introducing the topic to physicians in ambulatory care and incentive structures for using e-health.

Massive Open Online Courses

From an information systems research perspective, MOOCs represent an innovative, web-based business model for financing, designing, and provisioning educational services. Due to the increasing digitization and respective structuring of these services, the laws of the Internet economy Shapiro and Varian 1999; marginal costs of additional participants tend towards zero, occurrence of network and long-tail effects) open up higher education and vocational training to the masses. Thus, MOOCs offer great potential (e.g., increased effectiveness and eefficiencyin education) and challenges (e.g., new competitors) for academic institutions and other providers of educational services. The current academic discussion on MOOCs focuses on the different types of MOOCs the involved didactic concepts, as well as the technology and mechanisms that facilitate the scaling of educational services.

Gamification - Design of IT-Based Enhancing Services for Motivational Support and Behavioral Change

NikeFuel is the fuel of the Nike+ community. A fuel that has made two million users burn more than 68 bn. calories and that proliferates with each kilometer. The athletic performance of Nike+ users is measured via sensors in Nike sports shoes and an Apple iPod or iPhone, documented on the Nike+platform and converted into NikeFuel. In doing so, users may visualize their progress, compare their performance with others, and obtain different status levels that reflect their athletic potential. This approach derives from the domain of game design and is called gamification enriching products, services, and information systems with game-design elements in order to positively influence motivation, productivity, and behavior of users. In the consumer sector, various successful examples for gamication are gaining recognition. Gamication is a persuasive technology that attempts to influence user behavior by activating individual motives via game-design elements. As a consequence, this approach does not deal with designing games that can generally be defined as solving rule-based artificial conflicts or simulations. Thus, gamication needs to be contrasted to related concepts such as serious games and games with a purpose.

The Effect of Rating Scales on Decision Quality and User Attitudes in Online Innovation Communities

Given the rise of the Internet, consumers increasingly engage in co-creating products and services. Whereas most co-creation research deals with various aspects of generating user-generated content, this study addresses designing ratings scales for evaluating such content. In detail, we analyze functional and perceptional aspects of two frequently used rating scales in online innovation communities. Using a multimethod approach, our experiments show that a multicriteria scale leads to higher decision quality of users than a single-criterion scale, that idea elaboration (i.e., idea length) negatively moderates this effect such that the single-criterion rating scale outperforms the multicriteria scale for long ideas, and finally that the multicriteria scale leads to more favorable user attitudes toward the Web site. To ensure robustness of our results, we applied a bootstrap-based Monte Carlo simulation based on our experimental data. We found that around 20 user ratings per idea are sufficient for creating stable idea rankings and that a combination of both rating scales leads to a 63 percent performance improvement over the single-criterion rating scale and 16 percent over the multicriteria rating scale. Our work contributes to co-creation research by offering insights as to how the interaction of the technology being used (i.e., rating scale) and the attributes of the rating object affects two central outcome measures: the effectiveness of the rating in terms of decision quality of its users and the perception of the scale by its users as a predictor of future use.

An empirical taxonomy of crowdsourcing intermediaries

Due to the recent popularity of crowdfunding, a broad magnitude of crowdfunding intermediaries has emerged, while research on crowdfunding intermediaries has been largely neglected. As a consequence, existing classifications of crowdfunding intermediaries are conceptual, lack theoretical grounding, and are not empirically validated. Thus, we develop an empirical taxonomy of crowdfunding intermediaries, which is grounded in the theories of two-sided markets and financial intermediation. Integrating these theories, we develop a crowdfunding intermediation model that we use as foundation for performing cluster analysis with data of 127 intermediaries. We identify three generic archetypes of crowdfunding intermediaries, which differ in their value proposition: Hedonism, Altruism, and For Profit. Our crowdfunding intermediation model and our empirical taxonomy improve our understanding of crowdfunding by showing how crowdfunding intermediaries manage financial intermediation and digitally transform exchange relations between capital-giving and seeking agents in two-sided online markets. For practice, our research may help characterize the crowdfunding industry.

Anatomy of Successful Business Models for Complex Services: Insights from the Telemedicine Field

Abstract Telemedicine services may improve the quality of life of individuals while also reducing the costs of service provisioning. They represent an important but as yet understudied type of complex services that integrates many stakeholders acting in service value networks. These complex services typically comprise a combination of information technology (IT) services and highly person-oriented, non-IT services, and are characterized by long service delivery periods. In such an environment, it is particularly difficult to generate successful and sustainable business models, which are necessary for the widespread provision of telemedicine services. Following a design research approach, we develop and evaluate the CompBizMod framework, a morphological box allowing for: (1) the analysis, description, and classification of telemedicine business models, (2) the identification of white spots for future business opportunities, (3) and the identification of patterns for successful business models. We contribute to the literature by presenting a specific business model framework and identifying three business model patterns in the telemedicine industry. We exhibit how business models for complex services can be decomposed into their constituent elements and present an easy and replicable approach for identifying business model patterns in a given industry.

Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea Sourcing

Information technology (IT) has created new patterns of digitally-mediated collaboration that allow open sourcing of ideas for new products and services. These novel sociotechnical arrangements afford finely-grained manipulation of how tasks can be represented and have changed the way organizations ideate. In this paper, we investigate differences in behavioral decision-making resulting from IT-based support of open idea evaluation. We report results from a randomized experiment of 120 participants comparing IT-based decision-making support using a rating scale (representing a judgment task) and a preference market (representing a choice task). We find that the rating scale-based task invokes significantly higher perceived ease of use than the preference market-based task and that perceived ease of use mediates the effect of the task representation treatment on the users’ decision quality. Furthermore, we find that the understandability of ideas being evaluated, which we assess through the ideas’ readability, and the perception of the task’s variability moderate the strength of this mediation effect, which becomes stronger with increasing perceived task variability and decreasing understandability of the ideas. We contribute to the literature by explaining how perceptual differences of task representations for open idea evaluation affect the decision quality of users and translate into differences in mechanism accuracy. These results enhance our understanding of how crowdsourcing as a novel mode of value creation may effectively complement traditional work structures.

Accelerating customer integration into innovation processes using Pico Jobs

The internet enabled new forms of crowdsourcing by introducing electronic marketplaces for services that could hardly be traded before. Market places such as Amazon?s Mechanical Turk install a member base for third parties, where they can offer small, highly structured paid tasks which can hardly be solved automatically with ICT which we call Pico-Jobs. In this paper a new method for systematically utilizing the creative potential of the users of these market places for new product development is illustrated. We elaborate the characteristics of Pico-Jobs by reviewing leading crowdsourcing marketplaces. Our real-world case with OSRAM then pinpoints the potentials of Pico-Jobs for idea generation and validation such as the speed and the dynamic of involving customers into innovation processes. The article concludes with a discussion of potentials and limitations for companies applying Pico-Jobs. The article contributes a new concept for conducting open innovation and shows possibilities for future research in this area.

Crowdfunding: Outlining the New Era of Fundraising

Crowdfunding is increasingly gaining attention in theory and practice. Various platforms have emerged, offering entrepreneurs and project owners the possibility to raise money from an undefined group of online users (“crowd”). In this article we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the rise of crowdfunding as an alternative funding opportunity by discussing its main characteristics, the market development, different classification approaches, its fields of application and by providing directions for future research.

Is There PAPA in Crowd Work?: A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing

The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature, takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature, extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property, accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions, benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework, give practical insight into how to design sustainable, ethical crowd work.