Browsing by Author "Riedl, Christoph"

Electronic services delivered over the Internet are gaining importance in the business world. This area has seen an increase in scientific interest over the past years under the labels “Internet of Services” and Web-service ecosystems. The paper develops a conceptual framework of actors and their roles in an open innovation system for a networked ecosystem of Web-services. The framework illustrates how open innovation can be implemented in a Web-service ecosystem to increase innovation performance. Simultaneously this research closes a conceptual gap in current reasoning about Web-service ecosystems that neglects innovation processes. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by two case studies of Web-service ecosystems in which the framework was used to identify gaps in the implementation of open innovation processes. Our research results identify specific functions to support innovation processes.

The increasing popularity of open innovation approaches has led to the rise of various open innovation communities on the Internet which might contain several thousand user-generated ideas. However, a company’s absorptive capacity is limited regarding such an amount of ideas so that there is a strong need for mechanisms supporting the evaluation of these ideas. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of such mechanisms for collective idea evaluation. Applying a multi-method approach, we compare six different configurations of a prediction market with a multi-criteria rating scale that performed best in previous research. We combine a web-based experiment with 448 participants, data from a participant survey, and an independent expert jury. Based on cognitive load theory, we explain why a multi-criteria rating scale outperforms prediction markets in terms of evaluation accuracy and evaluation satisfaction. This study contributes to theory building in the emerging field of collective intelligence.

As the importance of services in our society increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop these services – commonly termed New Service Development (NSD). An increasing proportion of services are now electronic services delivered over the Internet. The purpose of this article is to derive a set of key attributes that distinguish electronic from non-electronic services and their potential influence on NSD. These key attributes are then used as a framework for analyzing NSD literature with regards to their applicability to the development of electronic services. This analysis revealed several gaps in NSD research. In particular current NSD methods are not well equipped to address the rapidly changing nature and specific cost structure found in electronic services. Moreover, current NSD methods are not well suited to fully exploit the various advantages electronic services offer over non-electronic counterparts, in particular, the transparent feedback generated by service usage and potentials for continuous improvement and rapid deployment of service changes.

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.

The increasing popularity of open innovation approaches has lead to the rise of various innovation platforms on the Internet which might contain 10.000s user-generated ideas. However, a company’s absorptive capacity is limited regarding such an amount of ideas so that there is a strong need for mechanism to identify the best ideas. Extending previous decision management research we focus on analyzing effective idea rating and selection mechanisms in online innovation communities and underlying explanations. Using a multi-method approach our research comprises a web-based rating experiment with 313 participants evaluating 24 ideas from a real-world innovation community, data from a survey measuring rating satisfaction of participants, and idea ratings from an independent expert jury. Our findings show that, despite its popular use in online innovation communities, simple rating mechanisms such as thumbs up/down rating or 5-star rating do not produce valid idea rankings and are significantly outperformed by the multi-attribute scale.

With over 400 million active users Facebook is undeniably a large social phenomenon and one of the largest social networks on the Internet. Together with Facebook a variety of novel communication styles have developed, dramatically influencing social interaction. The underlying paper reports the results of a survey (N=109) analyzing Facebook’s micro-blogging function available through users’ status updates. Our results suggest that the use of status update messaging generates a feeling of connectedness between users. Furthermore, non-parametric analyses distinguishing between low- and highconnected groups have been performed and experimentally confirmed the existence of distinct user profiles as a function of the variable “feeling connected”. The analyses revealed that the more individuals use their status message function to actively reveal information about themselves, the more connected they feel. Connectedness seems the result of active information sharing modulated by the amount of information shared rather than by the type of information an individual is sharing.

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.

We employ a 2x3 factorial experiment to study two central factors in the design of prediction markets (PMs) for idea evaluation: the overall design of the PM, and the elasticity of market prices set by a market maker. The results show that 'multi-market designs' on which each contract is traded on a separate PM lead to significantly higher trading performance than 'single-markets' that handle all contracts one on PM. Price elasticity has no direct effect on trading performance, but a significant interaction effect with market design implies that the performance difference between the market designs is highest in settings of moderate price elasticity. We contribute to the emerging research stream of PM design through an unprecedented experiment which compares current market designs.

As the importance of services in our society increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop these services - commonly termed New Service Development (NSD). An increasing proportion of services are now electronic services delivered over the Internet. The purpose of this article is to derive a set of key attributes that distinguish electronic from non-electronic services and their potential influence on NSD. These key attributes are then used as a framework for analyzing NSD literature with regards to their applicability for the development of electronic services. This analysis reveals several gaps in NSD research. In particular, current NSD methods are not well equipped to address the rapidly changing nature and specific cost structure found in electronic services. Current NSD methods are also not well suited to fully exploit the various advantages that electronic services offer over non-electronic counterparts, in particular, the transparent feedback generated by service usage and potentials for continuous improvement and rapid deployment of service changes.