Integrated billing mechanisms in the Internet of Things to support information sharing and enable new business opportunities

The Internet of Things (IOT) concept and enabling technologies such as RFID offer the prospect of linking the real world of physical objects with the virtual world of information technology to improve visibility and traceability information within supply chains and across the entire lifecycles of products, as well as enabling more intuitive interactions and greater automation possibilities. There is a huge potential for savings through process optimization and profit generation within the IOT, but the sharing of financial benefits across companies remains an unsolved issue. Existing approaches towards sharing of costs and benefits have failed to scale so far. The integration of payment solutions into the IOT architecture could solve this problem. We have reviewed different possible levels of integration. Multiple payment solutions have been researched. Finally we have developed a model that meets the requirements of the IOT in relation to openness and scalability. It supports both hardware-centric and software-centric approaches to integration of payment solutions with the IOT. Different requirements concerning payment solutions within the IOT have been defined and considered in the proposed model. Possible solution providers include telcos, e-payment service providers and new players such as banks and standardization bodies. The proposed model of integrating the Internet of Things with payment solutions will lower the barrier to invoicing for the more granular visibility information generated using the IOT. Thus, it has the potential to enable recovery of the necessary investments in IOT infrastructure and accelerate adoption of the IOT, especially for projects that are only viable when multiple benefits throughout the supply chain need to be accumulated in order to achieve a Return on Investment (ROI). In a long-term perspective, it may enable IT-departments to become profit centres instead of cost centres. © 2010 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.

Sharing data between LSDBs and central repositories.

Several Locus-Specific DataBases (LSDBs) have recently been approached by larger, more general data repositories (including NCBI and UCSC) with the request to share the DNA variant data they have collected. Within the Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS) a document was generated summarizing the issues related to these requests. The document has been circulated in the HGVS/LSDB community and was discussed extensively. Here we summarize these discussions and present the concluded recommendations for LSDB data sharing with central repositories.

ENGINEERING DIGITAL SHARING PLATFORM TO CREATE SOCIAL CONTAGION: EVIDENCE FROM LARGE SCALE RANDOMIZED FIELD EXPERIMENTS

Peer-to-peer information sharing has fundamentally changed customer decision-making process. Recent developments in information technologies have enabled digital sharing platforms to influence various granular aspects of the information sharing process. Despite the growing importance of digital information sharing, little research has examined the optimal design choices for a platform seeking to maximize returns from information sharing. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap. Specifically, I study novel interventions that can be implemented by the platform at different stages of the information sharing. In collaboration with a leading for-profit platform and a non-profit platform, I conduct three large-scale field experiments to causally identify the impact of these interventions on customers’ sharing behaviors as well as the sharing outcomes. The first essay examines whether and how a firm can enhance social contagion by simply varying the message shared by customers with their friends. Using a large randomized field experiment, I find that i) adding only information about the sender’s purchase status increases the likelihood of recipients’ purchase; ii) adding only information about referral reward increases recipients’ follow-up referrals; and iii) adding information about both the sender’s purchase as well as the referral rewards increases neither the likelihood of purchase nor follow-up referrals. I then discuss the underlying mechanisms. The second essay studies whether and how a firm can design unconditional incentive to engage customers who already reveal willingness to share. I conduct a field experiment to examine the impact of incentive design on sender’s purchase as well as further referral behavior. I find evidence that incentive structure has a significant, but interestingly opposing, impact on both outcomes. The results also provide insights about senders’ motives in sharing. The third essay examines whether and how a non-profit platform can use mobile messaging to leverage recipients’ social ties to encourage blood donation. I design a large field experiment to causally identify the impact of different types of information and incentives on donor’s self-donation and group donation behavior. My results show that non-profits can stimulate group effect and increase blood donation, but only with group reward. Such group reward works by motivating a different donor population. In summary, the findings from the three studies will offer valuable insights for platforms and social enterprises on how to engineer digital platforms to create social contagion. The rich data from randomized experiments and complementary sources (archive and survey) also allows me to test the underlying mechanism at work. In this way, my dissertation provides both managerial implication and theoretical contribution to the phenomenon of peer-to-peer information sharing.

Knowledge Sharing within IT Projects

Even though today’s corporations recognize that they need to understand modern project management techniques (Schwalbe, 2002, p2), many researchers continue to provide evidence of poor IT project success. With Kotnour, (2000) finding that project performance is positively associated with project knowledge, a better understanding of how to effectively manage knowledge in IT projects should have considerable practical significance for increasing the chances of project success. Using a combined qualitative/quantitative method of data collection in multiple case studies spanning four continents, and comprising a variety of organizational types, the focus of this current research centered on the question of why individuals working within IT project teams might be motivated towards, or inhibited from, sharing their knowledge and experience in their activities, procedures, and processes. The research concluded with the development of a new theoretical model of knowledge sharing behavior, ‘The Alignment Model of Motivational Focus’. This model suggests that an individual’s propensity to share knowledge and experience is a function of perceived personal benefits and costs associated with the activity, balanced against the individual’s alignment to a group of ‘institutional’ factors. These factors are identified as alignments to the project team, to the organization, and dependent on the circumstances, to either the professional discipline or community of practice, to which the individual belongs.