Jan Marco Leimeister

Leveraging Crowdsourcing: Activation-Supporting Components for IT-Based Ideas Competition

Ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing and open innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies. Active participation of potential lead users is the key to success. Yet a look at existing ideas competitions in the software field leads to the conclusion that many information technology (IT)-based ideas competitions fail to meet requirements upon which active participation is established. The paper describes how activation-enabling functionalities can be systematically designed and implemented in an IT-based ideas competition for enterprise resource planning software. We proceeded to evaluate the outcomes of these design measures and found that participation can be supported using a two-step model. The components of the model support incentives and motives of users. Incentives and motives of the users then support the process of activation and consequently participation throughout the ideas competition. This contributes to the successful implementation and maintenance of the ideas competition, thereby providing support for the development of promising innovative ideas. The paper concludes with a discussion of further activation-supporting components yet to be implemented and points to rich possibilities for future research in these areas.

Community Engineering for Innovations: The Ideas Competition as a Method to Nurture a Virtual Community for Innovations

‘Crowdsourcing’ is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the ‘collective brain’ to broaden the scope of ‘open R&D’. Based on a literature review in the fields of Community Building and Innovation Management, this work develops an integrated framework called ‘Community Engineering for Innovations’. This framework is evaluated in an Action Research project – the case of an ideas competition for an ERP Software company. The case ‘SAPiens’ includes the design, implementation and evaluation of an IT-supported ideas competition within the SAP University Competence Center (UCC) User Group. This group consists of approximately 60,000 people (lecturers and students) using SAP Software for educational purposes. The current challenges are twofold: on the one hand, there is not much activity yet in this community. On the other, SAP has not attempted to systematically address this highly educated group for idea generation or innovation development so far. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a framework for a community-based innovation development that generates innovations, process and product ideas in general and for SAP Research, in particular, combining the concepts of idea competitions and virtual communities. Furthermore, the concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students in this virtual community. This paper is the first to present an integrated concept for IT-supported idea competitions in virtual communities for leveraging the potential of crowds that is evaluated in a real-world setting.

Success factors of virtual communities from the perspective of members and operators: an empirical study

Virtual communities have been the focus of research for some time. However, while many studies provide recommendations on how to build, extend and manage virtual communities, few verify the success factors they consider essential for virtual communities. Conclusions made regarding basic preferences and distinct priorities of different stakeholders in virtual communities have not been empirically substantiated. This study uses an online survey of members and operators of virtual communities to evaluate success factors discussed in the literature. Incongruences between members and operators are identified and analysed. This research gains first empirically validated insights into success factors for establishing and managing virtual communities. The study results are summarised in ten hypotheses.

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.

Dienstleistungsengineering und -management

Dieses Lehrbuch beschaftigt sich mit den Grundlagen, zentralen Prozessen und Methoden sowie Anwendungsbeispielen fur die systematische Entwicklung neuer Dienstleistungen (Dienstleistungsengineering) sowie deren Management uber den Lebenszyklus (Dienstleistungsmanagement). Ein Schwerpunkt liegt hierbei auf der Rolle von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IT) fur die Gestaltung und Erbringung von Dienstleistungen. Das Buch bereitet den aktuellen Stand in Forschung und Praxis uber das Dienstleistungsengineering und -management lerngerecht auf und gibt Studenten wie Praktikern Theorien, Methoden und Werkzeuge an die Hand, um Dienstleistungen durch den Einsatz von IT systematisch zu gestalten und effizient zu erbringen und neue Formen der Arbeitsteilung und Wertschopfung fur sich nutzbar zu machen.

Business Models: An Information Systems Research Agenda

The business model concept, although a relatively new topic for research, has garnered growing attention over the past decade. Whilst it has been robustly defined, the concept has so far attracted very little substantive research. In the context of the wide-spread digitization of businesses and society at large, the logic inherent in a business model has become critical for business success and, hence, a focus for academic inquiry. The business model concept is identified as the missing link between business strategy, processes, and Information Technology (IT). The authors argue that the BISE community offers distinct and unique competencies (e.g., translating business strategies into IT systems, managing business and IT processes, etc.) that can be harnessed for significant research contributions to this field. Within this research gap three distinct streams are delineated, namely, business models in IT industries, IT enabled or digital business models, and IT support for developing and managing business models. For these streams, the current state of the art, suggest critical research questions, and suitable research methodologies are outlined.

Exploring Success Factors of Virtual Communities: The Perspectives of Members and Operators

Virtual communities have been the focus of research for some time. However, although many studies have provided recommendations on how to build, extend, and manage virtual communities, few have verified the success factors they have considered essential for virtual communities. Conclusions made regarding basic preferences and distinct priorities of different stakeholders in virtual communities have not been empirically substantiated. Building on previous work on success factors of virtual communities, in this article, we present a ranking of success factors discussed in the literature based on an online survey among operators and members of virtual communities in the German speaking Internet. Consequently, we identified and analyzed incongruencies between members and operators. This research gains first empirically validated insights into success factors for establishing and managing virtual communities. We derived recommendations for operators of virtual communities on the basis of the findings, and we present an agenda for future research in the field.

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.

Do Point of Sale RFID-Based Information Services Make a Difference? Analyzing Consumer Perceptions for Designing Smart Product Information Services in Retail Business

The increase in RFID implementation in retail allows the development of smart product information applications. However, literature describes only a few evaluations of RFID retail applications with real consumers. The question that arises is, whether such theoretically possible user-centric ubiquitous computing applications meet user needs and, if so, what method is best to investigate this? For our investigation, we developed a mobile phone application prototype based on Near Field Communication (NFC) to obtain product information at the Point of Sale (PoS). Following the ideas of Davis and Venkatesh (2004) and Abowd et al. (2005) with an extended pre-prototype approach for application development and evaluation, we conducted two focus groups (10 consumers, 10 sales assistants). While participants considered the NFC technology innovative and very easy to use ? the need for further information at the PoS was low and varied between product categories. Our approach found that user opinions about paper-based concepts and real prototypes were different from the findings of Davis and Venkatesh (2004). This paper is the first to evaluate a smart information product system with an existing prototype and real consumers, as well as sales personnel. The findings contribute to the theory of ubiquitous computing by proposing a modified approach to evaluating user acceptance and to refining information system requirements for RFID-based smart products. The findings also reflect the response of sales personnel to RFID penetration in shops, suggest how mobile services can add user benefits, and help in the selection of what is the most beneficial information to present at the PoS.