Sandra Sieber

Virtuality and Virtualization

In today’s rapidly changing global work environment, all workers directly experience increased organizational complexity. Companies are functionally distributed, many across the globe. Intense competition for markets and margins makes adaptiveness and innovation imperative. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are pervasive and fundamental infrastructures, their use deeply integrated into work processes. Workers collaborate electronically with co-workers they may never meet face-to-face or with employees of other companies. New boundaries of time, space, business unit, culture, company partnerships, and software tools are driving the adoption of a variety of novel organizational forms. On a macro-level, these changes have started to reshape society, leading some to speak of the “Network Society” and the “Information Age.”

Market Bundling Strategies in the Horizontal Portal Industry

The Internet offers opportunities for incremental efficiency gains as well as complete industry redefinition, but the marketplace has been slow to realize opportunities because of problems with value appropriation. This paper focuses on horizontal portals, a business activity that has emerged thanks to the Internet. It shows how different approaches to strategic industry analysis fail to provide a comprehensive view of industries in the information value system. As different markets become intertwined, strategic market bundling appears to be a superior strategy, and overall value appropriation opportunities have to be analyzed from this broader perspective .

How Uncertainty and Risk Management Impacts the Success of Spanish Film Projects

Abstract This paper studies the impact of risk project management offilm productions on the success of the release of motion picture films. Bylooking at the production of three Spanish films, the paper analyzes the challenges that producers face throughout the various stages of a filmproject. It specifically focuses on management’s approach to the uncertainty that may arise during the development stage of the project.Four distinct uncertainty types are identified: variation uncertainty, foreseen uncertainty, unforeseen uncertainty, and chaos. The paper shows how the appearance of different types of uncertainty requiresproducers to adjust their management style, and how appropriate or inappropriate actions have an impact on the likelihood of an overall successful release of a motion picture.

Uses and Attitudes of Young People Toward Technology and Mobile Telephony

This paper aims at showing how young people are developing new and innovative ways of interacting using technology. Previous literature shows that technology adoption depends not only on the technology per se, but also on situational and contextual issues. Mobile telephony has been claimed to change young peoples lifestyles, although only scarce empirical evidence exists. We have conducted an empirical study in which we first analyze the existence of differences in technology adoption, acquisition, and usage of technology and mobile telephony between young people in general and those that are online. We find that there are some significant differences in certain dimensions. Next, we carried out the same analysis differentiating between young people that assess themselves as technology-savvy and those that consider themselves inexpert in technology matters. We find that patterns of mobile phone usage in these two groups vary significantly along all analyzed dimensions.

The Digital Economy: It’s Not the Technology, It’s the Business Model, Stupid!

That technology is reshaping the media and entertainment landscape goes without saying. Digital devices are dramatically changing everything we do and every way we work today. Media and entertainment executives will be familiar with most of them. The focus of this chapter is on understanding the underlying business models and ecosystems on which today’s digital revolution is being built. It discusses some of the key trends in online business and tries to project their future implications. Most important is the need to adopt a digital mindset—because no matter what new tech innovation comes next, you, as a manager, need to have the capabilities and competencies to be ready for anything.