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The purpose of this paper is to build possible future scenarios for indoor connectivity in a venue such as a university campus and build alternative value network configurations (VNCs) defining different local network deployment options, focused on the Finnish telecom market.

In this paper, Schoemaker’s scenario planning method (Schoemaker, 1995) is used to construct future scenarios and the VNC method of Casey et al. (2010) is used to build alternative VNCs. The paper studies the Aalto University campus network for current end-user data usage demand and the existing technology used in meeting the end-user needs and forecasts the demand for the next five years to understand the need for 5G.

This research concludes that with the provision of local spectrum licenses, there is an opportunity for venue owners to take the role of 5G local operator on the venue premises. Furthermore, it enables venue owners to collaborate with the incumbent mobile network operators (MNOs) in a neutral host model and provide venue-specific connectivity services.

A detailed economic assessment for the network deployment in the campus is considered for future study.

Considering the provision for local spectrum licenses, this paper has taken a unique attempt in identifying the future scenarios for local 5G network operations. It provides a strategic direction for the venue owners in adopting 5G technology and whether to make 5G or buy 5G from MNOs.

The transportation system in any city is complex and evolving, shaped by various driving forces and uncertainties in the social, economic, technological, political and environmental situations. Its development and demands upon it cannot be projected by simply extrapolating past and current trends. This paper aims to present a foresight study examining the future of urban mobility, focusing on the dense Asian city-state of Singapore. The objective is to develop scenarios for the future of urban mobility, to facilitate future policy implementation by highlighting long term challenges and opportunities for transportation planning in cities.

To create future scenarios, the authors first sought to identify key drivers of change through environmental scanning, expert interviews, focus group discussions and technology scanning. These drivers of change were subsequently used in a scenario planning workshop, organized to co-create alternative future visions for urban mobility 2040 with experts and local stakeholders.

Two scenarios emerged, called the Shared World and the Virtual World. For each scenario, the authors described the key features in terms of dominant transport modes for the movements of passengers and freight. Subsequently, the authors discussed possible implications of each scenario to the individual, society, industry and government.

As cities grow and develop, city and transport planners should not only address daily operational issues but also develop a well-informed, long-term understanding of the evolving mobility system to address challenges that lie beyond the five- or even ten-year horizon. By using scenario planning approach, the authors hope to prepare stakeholders for the uncertain futures that are continuously shaped by the decisions today.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the existing scenarios for 3D printing (3DP) in order to identify the “white space” where future opportunities have not been proposed or developed to date. Based around aspects of order penetration points, geographical scope and type of manufacturing, these gaps are identified.

A structured literature review has been carried out on both academic and trade publications. As of the end of May 2016, this identified 128 relevant articles containing 201 future scenarios. Coding these against aspects of existing manufacturing and supply chain theory has led to the development of a framework to identify “white space” in the existing thinking.

The coding shows that existing future scenarios are particularly concentrated on job shop applications and pull-based supply chain processes, although there are fewer constraints on geographical scope. Five distinct areas of “white space” are proposed, reflecting various opportunities for future 3DP supply chain development.

Being a structured literature review, there are potentially articles not identified through the search criteria used. The nature of the findings is also dependent upon the coding criteria selected. However, these are theoretically derived and reflect important aspect of strategic supply chain management.

Practitioners may wish to explore the development of business models within the “white space” areas.

Currently, existing future 3DP scenarios are scattered over a wide, multi-disciplinary literature base. By providing a consolidated view of these scenarios, it is possible to identify gaps in current thinking. These gaps are multi-disciplinary in nature and represent opportunities for both academics and practitioners to exploit.

The trend toward subscription economy accelerated the rise of access-based consumption models for durable consumer goods, replacing individual ownership with subscription contracts. At the same time, disruptive platform businesses have arisen in several consumer markets, bypassing traditional value chains while growing through network effects. In a conceptual approach, the authors address the future market for durable consumer goods in light of developments toward access-based consumption, subscription models and platform business models.

In a conceptual approach, the authors apply a scenario analysis following the Framework Foresight method and address trends, constants, plans and projections shaping the future market of subscriptions for durable goods. The authors create a baseline scenario and two alternative scenarios for the future of consumer durables and thereby discuss platform growth stages and implications for manufacturer brands.

The rising market power of platform companies leads to a baseline scenario where these platforms enter the market of subscriptions for durable goods. Alternative scenario 1 addresses the successful market entry of new platform businesses. In contrast, alternative scenario 2 describes the rise of manufacturer brand platforms.

This conceptual research enriches the discussion of access-based business models by creating scenarios depicting possible future developments. Moreover, it adds to the increasing focus on platform business models and thereby addresses the role of traditional manufacturer brands in markets for durable consumer goods subscriptions.

Apitourism is a form of tourism that deals with the culture and traditions of rural communities and can be considered one of the most sustainable methods of development and tourism. Accordingly, this study aims to identify the key factors and plausible scenarios of Iranian apitourism in the future.

This study is applied research. For this purpose, first, by examining the theoretical foundations and interviewing experts, the key factors affecting the future of Iranian apitourism were identified. Then, using a binomial test, these factors were screened. Both critical uncertainty and DEMATEL techniques were used to select the final drivers.

Two drivers of “apitourism information system and promotional activities” and “organizing ecological infrastructure” were selected for scenario planning using critical uncertainty and DEMATEL techniques. According to these two drivers, four golden beehive, expectancy, anonymous bee and black beehive scenarios were developed. Each scenario represents a situation for apitourism in the future. According to the criteria of trend compliance, fact-based plausibility and compliance with current data, the “Black Beehive” scenario was selected as the most likely scenario. The “Golden Beehive” scenario shows the best case in terms of apitourism information system and implementation of promotional activities and organizing and providing ecological infrastructure. The “Black Beehive” scenario, on the other hand, describes an isolated and vulnerable system.

Developing plausible Iranian apitourism scenarios helps key stakeholders and actors develop flexible plans for various situations.

The purpose of this paper is to portray the future of tourism in New Zealand based upon a philosophy of sustainability and cultural identity as a response to the present 2025 Tourism Strategy.

The research deployed a scenario planning methodology resulting in four portraits of the future.

Environmental issues and global migration are the key issues that will shape the future of New Zealand tourism. In order to address these issues four scenarios were constructed. New Zealand Wonderland portrays a future based upon a grounded international reputation for environmentalism driven by good governance, climate change targets and ecotourism. Indiana Jones and the Search for Cultural Identity position a future driven by rapid growth and unregulated air travel resulting in environmental degradation. A Peaceful Mixture is a balance of socio‐cultural and environmental dimensions of sustainability at the centre of a tourism product shaped upon Maori culture and economic prosperity. The final scenario, New Zealand in Depression, is the worst possible outcome for New Zealand's tourism industry as the three dimensions of economy, community, and environment are not at equilibrium. New Zealand would be over‐polluted with an uncontrolled number of migrants.

The research was a social construction of ten experts’ views on the future of sustainable tourism.

New Zealand's present approach to the future of tourism is shaped by the 2025 Tourism Framework (http://tourism2025.org.nz/). This is derived from a business perspective and a neoliberal political philosophy and it is void of the words ecotourism and sustainability. This paper argues that the present strategy will fail because of community disengagement that proposes a range of alternative directions based upon a political discourse of sustainability and shaped by environmental credentials and cultural identity.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the analysis and grasp of accessible tourism, from its present into a medium-term future. It provides a socio-anthropological approach.

This paper uses the scenarios-planning analysis framework proposing four scenarios arising from the interaction of aforementioned driving forces. The author also use a trilemma to both form and evaluate scenarios. The criteria for the trilemma were (stakeholders, cooperation and prejudice).

The strength of combining a new set of driving forces, namely, empathy, apathy, certainty in economic profits and fear of economic losses, which would enable to draw four plausible scenarios into the future of accessible tourism within a scenarios-planning framework. The significance is to provide “food for thought” to address the future through a range of different concepts.

The main limitation is the difficulty to obtain honest answers about why the lack of development of accessible tourism.

Participant observation on both groups and individuals in vacation atmosphere. Also, in-depth interviews to different stakeholder representatives.

To try to explain to the stakeholders their wasted economic benefits and, at the same time, the opportunity of getting social prestige.

The main value is about considering the interplay of social concepts as empathy, apathy, “aesthetic prejudice” and fear of losses or faith in profits.

Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on, monitoring services became one of the major interests, including sensing technologies, and then more actuation for remote control-type of IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities and Industry 4.0. In this paper, the authors focus on the RFID technology impairment. They propose to take advantage of the mature IoT technologies that offer native service discovery such as blutooth or LTE D2D ProSe or Wifi Direct. Using the automatic service discovery in the new framework will make heterogeneous readers aware of the presence of other readers and this will be used by the proposed distributed algorithm to better control the multiple RFID reader interference problem. The author clearly considers emerging Industry 4.0 use case, where RFID technology is of major interest for both identification and tracking. To enhance the RFID tag reading performance, collisions in the RFID frequency should be minimized with reader-to-reader coordination protocols. In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation.

In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation to study its behavior in very dense and heterogeneous RFID environments. Specifically, the author explores the coexistence of powerful static readers and small mobile readers, comparing the proposal with a standard ETSI CSMA method. The proposal reduces significantly the number of access attempts, which are resource-expensive for the readers. The results show that the objectives of DiSim are met, producing low reader collision probability and, however, having lower average readings per reader per time.

DiSim is evaluated with the ETSI standard LBT protocol for multi-reader environments in several environments with varied levels of reader and tag densities, having both static powerful RFID readers and heterogeneous randomly moving mobile RFID readers. It effectively reduces the number of backoffs or contentions for the RFID channel. This has high reading success rate due to the avoided collisions; however, the readers are put to wait, and DiSim has less average readings per reader per time. As an additional side evaluation, the ETSI standard LBT mechanism was found to present a good performance for low-density mid-coverage scenarios, however, with high variability on the evaluation results.

To show more results, the author needs to do real experimentation in a warehouse, such as Amazon warehouse, where he expects to have more and more robots, start shelves, automatic item finding on the shelve, etc.

Future work considers experimentation in a real warehouse equipped with heterogeneous RFID readers and real-time analysis of RFID reading efficiency also combined with indoor localization and navigation for warehouse mobile robots.

More automatization is expected in the future; this work makes the use of RFID technology more efficient and opens more possibilities for services deployment in different domains such as the industry which was considered not only in this paper but also in smart cites and smart homes.

Compared to the literature, the proposal offers the advantage to not be dependent on a centralized server controlling the RFID readers. It also offers the possibility for an existing RFID architecture to add new readers from a different manufacturer, as the readers using the approach will have the possibility to discover the capabilities of the new interaction other RFID readers. This solution takes advantage of the available proximity service that will be more and more offered by the IoT technologies.

Service robots are taking over the organizational frontline. Despite a recent surge in studies on this topic, extant works are predominantly conceptual in nature. The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable empirical insights by building on the attribution theory.

Two vignette-based experimental studies were employed. Data were collected from US respondents who were randomly assigned to scenarios focusing on a hotel’s reception service and restaurant’s waiter service.

Results indicate that respondents make stronger attributions of responsibility for the service performance toward humans than toward robots, especially when a service failure occurs. Customers thus attribute responsibility to the firm rather than the frontline robot. Interestingly, the perceived stability of the performance is greater when the service is conducted by a robot than by an employee. This implies that customers expect employees to shape up after a poor service encounter but expect little improvement in robots’ performance over time.

Robots are perceived to be more representative of a firm than employees. To avoid harmful customer attributions, service providers should clearly communicate to customers that frontline robots pack sophisticated analytical, rather than simple mechanical, artificial intelligence technology that explicitly learns from service failures.

Customer responses to frontline robots have remained largely unexplored. This paper is the first to explore the attributions that customers make when they experience robots in the frontline.

The purpose of this study is to measure the predictive value of future scenarios prepared using horizon scanning. The future scenarios prepared at the initiative of the Japanese Government have had low predictive value. They have frequently failed to contribute to industrial development and caused social loss. Horizon scanning, which is a key methodology applied in foresight activities, has begun to be used in countries as part of their national innovation systems in lieu of conventional forecasting methods based on the assumption of technological innovation. Research was conducted to actually measure the predictive value of future scenarios prepared using horizon scanning.

An online survey in Japan was conducted on ordinary people’s attitudes. The questionnaires presented 20 scenarios regarding future society, which were created with the conventional method or horizon scanning method.

Survey results verified that horizon scanning-based scenarios provided significantly higher predictive value than scenarios prepared using conventional methods.

Implication 1: By eliminating bias in input data and perspectives adopted when considering scenarios, it may be expected that scenarios will be derived that have even higher “predictive value.” Implication 2: By setting the layers of anticipated outputs high and the fields broad, it may be expected that scenarios will be derived that have even greater “change.”

The relatively high rate for the predictive value of the horizon scanning method, more than 40%, validated in this study was significant.