Designing business models for cloud platforms

BUSINESS MODEL CONFIGURATIONS IN DIGITAL HEALTHCARE–A GERMAN CASE STUDY ABOUT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital ventures are flooding the healthcare market in Germany and setting new standards for innovative digital health systems and tools. A key challenge in this sector from both academic and practitioner perspectives remains the intransparency of business model configurations applied by digital health. We tackle this problem by conducting a comparative case study of 237 digital health ventures. These ventures are examined on the business model level, exploring the digital technology components of each company and relating them to the identified areas of activity. The resulting dominant combinations of the two dimensions highlight four key areas of activity and two technological core elements. Within these dominant combinations we identify intriguing configurations of business model activities. The dominant Software(-as-a-Service) logic supports the criteria of interoperability on different levels. This research contributes to the growing academic literature stream of digital technology and entrepreneurship in healthcare.

Dynamic Simulation Research on the Effect of Governance Mechanism on Value Co-Creation of Blockchain Industry Ecosystem

The development of blockchain technology promotes the evolution of the industrial ecosystem, and the value co-creation in the ecosystem has become an important factor for the sustainable and coordinated development of the blockchain industry ecosystem. By answering the question of how governance mechanisms affect the value co-creation of the blockchain industry ecosystem, this paper aims to clarify the realization mechanism of value co-creation of the blockchain industry ecosystem. Based on the transaction cost theory and social exchange theory, the governance mechanisms of the blockchain industry ecosystem are divided into contract governance and trust governance. The system dynamics method is used to analyze the causality of the effect of governance mechanisms on value co-creation of the blockchain industry ecosystem, the model of system flow chart is established, and Vensim PLE software is used to perform simulation and sensitivity analyses of the model. The results show that: both contract governance and trust governance can positively affect the value co-creation of the blockchain industry ecosystem; due to the existence of bounded rationality, compared with contract governance, trust governance has a more significant impact on system resource innovation and value co-creation; there is a co-existence effect among contract governance and trust governance, and compared with the single effect, the co-existence effect of two can promote the value co-creation process of the blockchain industry ecosystem more actively. The research results reveal the internal laws of the value co-creation and provide valuable insights into the exploitation of governance mechanisms to facilitate effectively the value creation of the blockchain industry ecosystem.

Digitizing the field: designing ERP systems for Triple-A humanitarian supply chains

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore what design principles need to be considered in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for humanitarian organizations (HOs) to enable agile, adaptive and aligned (Triple-A) humanitarian supply chain capabilities and digitize humanitarian operations.

Design/methodology/approach

This study follows an embedded case study approach with a humanitarian medical relief organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which engaged in a multiyear ERP design at its humanitarian field missions.

Findings

This research shows that ERP systems for humanitarian organizations should be designed as unique systems addressing humanitarian organizations' challenges and unique missions, their value generation processes, and resource base in an effort to improve organizational performance. This study presents 12 general design principles that are unique for humanitarian organizations. These design principles provide a high-level structure of guidance under which specific requirements can be further defined and engineered to achieve success.

Research limitations/implications

The results of this study are based on a single case study limiting generalizability. However, the case study was analyzed and presented as an embedded case study with five autonomous subunits using different business processes and following different adoption and implementation approaches. Therefore, the findings are derived based on considerable variance reflective of humanitarian organizations beyond MSF.

Practical implications

This study recognizes that HOs have unique routines that standard commercial ERP packages do not address easily at the field level. The primary contribution of this research is a set of design principles that consider these unique routines and guide ERP development in practice. National and international HOs that are planning to implement information systems, private companies that are trading partners of HOs as well as vendors of ERP systems that are looking for new opportunities would all benefit from this research.

Originality/value

This study fills the gap in the humanitarian literature regarding the design of ERP systems for humanitarian organizations that enable Triple–A supply chain capabilities and it advances the knowledge of the challenges of ERP design by HOs in the context of humanitarian operations.

Value Modeling for Ecosystem Analysis

Scholars have proposed many approaches to represent and analyze value creation. Value creation in ecosystems such as platform ecosystems often relies on a specific structure of partner alignment. Value modeling techniques can improve the understanding of how ecosystem risks and non-generic complementarities determine value creation and the alignment structures required. First, we conceptualize ecosystem analysis as a tool for alignment in the context of business innovation. Then, we carry out a structured literature review to identify existing techniques, which could support ecosystem analysis. Further, we provide a comprehensive overview of the value modeling techniques and integrate our ecosystem analysis conceptualization with existing classification frameworks. This integrative framework allows researchers and scholars to identify techniques that suit specific needs in terms of internal alignment reach, tooling, innovation phase and ecosystem analysis. Our results show limited support for ecosystem analysis. Still we are able to identify techniques that can provide a useful conceptual or tooling basis to enable ecosystem analysis.

User-Oriented ICT Cloud Architecture for High-Accuracy GNSS-Based Services

We introduce a new information and communication technology (ICT) cloud-based architecture for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) high-accuracy solutions, offering also a commercial overview of GNSS downstream market to show how the developed innovation is thought to fit in the real context. The designed architecture is featured by dynamic scalability, increased integrity, and greater agility of the ICT system. The novelty of the solution developed is a customized ICT architecture, obtained through unique and privileged access to user communities in the frame of the H2020 project TREASURE, allowing the development of a solution entirely driven by user needs. The economic outlook of GNSS downstream markets evolution highlights how the technology proposed effectively matches the evolving business environment, specifically in regard to the increasing need for flexibility and competitive advantage deriving from services. The simultaneous adoption of the technical and commercial perspective is meant to offer interesting findings to both the scientific community and GNSS industry, creating synergies previously unexplored.