Search results

This study aims to provide an excellent overview of current research trends in the construction sector in digital advancements. It provides a roadmap to policymakers for the effective utilisation of emergent digital technologies and a need for a managerial shift for its smooth adoption.

A total of 3,046 peer-reviewed journal review articles covering Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, building information modelling (BIM) and digital technologies within the construction sector were reviewed using scientometric mapping and weighted mind-map analysis techniques.

Prominent research clusters identified were: practice-factor-strategy, system, sustainability, BIM and construction worker safety. Leading countries, authors, institutions and their collaborative networks were identified with the UK, the USA, China and Australia leading this field of research. A conceptual framework for an IoT-based concrete lifecycle quality control system is provided.

The study traces the origins of the initial application of Industry 4.0 concepts in the construction field and reviews available literature from 1983 to 2021. It raises awareness of the latest developments and potential landscape realignment of the construction industry through digital technologies conceptual framework for an IoT-based concrete lifecycle quality control system is provided.

Business Model Innovation is increasingly created by an ecosystem of related companies. This paper aims to investigate the transition of a manufacturing ecosystem toward electric vehicles from a business model perspective.

The authors investigate an automotive manufacturing ecosystem that is in transition toward electric and electrified vehicles, conducting semi-structured interviews with 46 informants from 27 ecosystem members.

The results reveal that the actions of several ecosystem members are driven by regulations relating to emissions. Novel requirements regarding components and complementary offers necessitate the entry of actors from other industries and the formation of new ecosystem members. While the newly emerged ecosystem has roots in an established ecosystem, it relies on new value offers. Further, the findings highlight the importance of ecosystem governance, while the necessary degree of change in the members' business models depends on their roles and positions in the ecosystem. Therefore, upstream suppliers of components must perform business model adaptation, whereas downstream providers must perform more complex business model innovation.

The paper is among the first to investigate an entire manufacturing ecosystem and analyze its transition toward electric vehicles and the implications for business model innovation.

After the completion of this case study, students will be able to understand the importance of being close to local people when embarking on social business; understand that clear purpose and good decision-making can lead to great outcomes; and learn that innovation is crucial to ensure sustainability of both business and impact.

The case highlights the journey of Laiterie du Berger (LDB), a social enterprise in the agribusiness industry and the challenges faced as it expands and innovates. LDB’s roots lie in its commitment to social impact, aiming to uplift the Fulani livestock farmers and address socioeconomic issues. The company’s business model prioritizes people over profits, focusing on sustainable development and poverty alleviation. The LDB case showcases the challenges and opportunities in the agribusiness industry. LDB’s commitment to social impact, demonstrated through its support for farmers and sustainable farming practices, has been integral to its success. As the company expands and innovates, it faces critical decisions that require balancing financial growth with social responsibility. By embracing development, innovation and collaboration, LDB can continue to be a catalyst for positive change in the agribusiness industry while staying true to its roots and the principles that have defined its journey.

This case study is designed for bachelor’s and master’s degree students in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as MBA students. The case focuses on social entrepreneurship with the example of an agribusiness company located in Senegal, prioritizing social impact and quality of life. The case study explores the dynamics of the sector, including expansion strategy, innovation initiatives and the dilemma of balancing social mission and profit that social entrepreneurs may be facing. By analyzing this real-world situation of LDB, students will have the opportunity to enhance their decision-making skills.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship

The logistics industry has undergone a tremendous transformation. This transformation is necessary to cope with the fundamental changes in customer expectations and the need for digitalization imposed by the pandemic, changes in the socioeconomic world, and innovative technology solutions. This paper aims to present digital transformation as an integrated framework for transforming the operating model and applying advanced solutions to the ecosystem of a quintile logistics (5PL) company. 5PL operators are typically an ecosystem. Loosely coupled or self-organized entities that collaborate in a symbiotic relationship represent this ecosystem. They aim to jointly develop capabilities, create innovative services or solutions, share knowledge, facilitate transactions, and leverage network synergies in a logistics environment to provide optimized or novel customer- or partner-centric solutions (Lamberjohann and Otto, 2020).

Currently, there is no single definition of an integrated logistics operations model in 5PL practice, so the qualitative method used in this paper allows for investigation from an exploratory perspective. The paper follows a qualitative research methodology, collecting and analyzing data/facts through interviews and visits to subject matter experts, industry practitioners, and academic researchers, combined with an extensive review of academic publications, industry reports, and written and media content from established organizations in the marketplace. This paper follows a qualitative research methodology, as it is an inquiry rather than a statistical study. The qualitative method allows the study of the concepts of phenomena and definitions, their characteristics, and the defining features that serve as the basis (Berg, 2007). It emphasizes generalized interpretation and deeper understanding of concepts, which would be more difficult in quantitative, statistically based research. Fact-finding was conducted in two ways: in-depth interviews with experts from academia, information and communication technology organizations, and key players in the logistics industry; and academic publications, industry reports, and written and media content from established national and international organizations in the market.

The operations model introduced considers six aspects: persons, processes, platforms, partners, protection and preservation. A virtual team approach can support the personal side of the 5PL ecosystem’s digital transformation. Managing a 5PL ecosystem should be based on collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment methods (Parsa et al., 2020). A digital platform can support trust among the stakeholders in the ecosystem. A blockchain solution can powerfully support the 5PL ecosystem from partner relationships’ points of view. The implementation of a cybersecurity reference model is important for protection (Bandari, 2023). Reverse logistics and an integrated approach support the preservation of the ecosystem.

While the author has experience applying the different components of the operations model presented, it would be interesting to find a 5PL that would use all the components presented in an integrated way. The operations model presented applies to any similar ecosystem with minor adaptations.

This paper addresses operations models and digital transformation challenges for optimizing 5PL operators. It provides several opportunities and considerations for 5PL operators interested in improving their management and operations to cope with the growing challenges of today’s world.

The competitiveness and long-term performance of 5PL operators depend on selecting and carefully implementing their operations models. This paper emphasizes the importance of using advanced operations models.

The operations model derives from the author’s personal experiences in research and the innovative application of these models to logistics operators (DHL, UPS, Poste Italiane and others). This paper brings together academic and industry perspectives and operations models in an integrated business digital transformation. This paper defines an original optimal operations model for a 5PL operator and can add sustainable value to organizations and society. In doing so, it outlines different solution requirements, the critical success factors and the challenges for solutions and brings logistical performance objectives when implementing a digital business transformation.

Security assurance evaluation (SAE) is a well-established approach for assessing the effectiveness of security measures in systems. However, one aspect that is often overlooked in these evaluations is the assurance context in which they are conducted. This paper aims to explore the role of assurance context in system SAEs and proposes a conceptual model to integrate the assurance context into the evaluation process.

The conceptual model highlights the interrelationships between the various elements of the assurance context, including system boundaries, stakeholders, security concerns, regulatory compliance and assurance assumptions and regulatory compliance.

By introducing the proposed conceptual model, this research provides a framework for incorporating the assurance context into SAEs and offers insights into how it can influence the evaluation outcomes.

By delving into the concept of assurance context, this research seeks to shed light on how it influences the scope, methodologies and outcomes of assurance evaluations, ultimately enabling organizations to strengthen their system security postures and mitigate risks effectively.

The world is increasingly threatened by climate change. As the dimensions of this danger grow, it becomes essential to develop the most effective policies to mitigate its impacts and adapt to these new conditions. Technology is one of the most crucial components of this process, and this study focuses on examining climate change adaptation technologies. The aim of the study is to investigate the entire spectrum of technology actors and to concentrate on the technology citation network established from the past to the present, aiming to identify the core actors within this structure and provide a more comprehensive outlook.

The study explores patent citation relationships using social network analysis. It utilizes patent data published between 2000 and 2023 and registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Study findings reveal that technologies related to greenhouse technologies in agriculture, technologies for combatting vector-borne diseases in the health sector, rainwater harvesting technologies for water management, and urban green infrastructure technologies for infrastructure systems emerge as the most suitable technologies for adaptation. For instance, greenhouse technologies hold significant potential for sustainable agricultural production and coping with the adverse effects of climate change. Additionally, ICTs establish intensive connections with nearly all other technologies, thus supporting our efforts in climate change adaptation. These technologies facilitate data collection, analysis, and management, contributing to a better understanding of the impacts of climate change.

Existing patent analysis methods often fall short in detailing the unique contributions of each technology within a technological network. This study addresses this deficiency by comprehensively examining and evaluating each technology within the network, thereby enabling us to better understand how these technologies interact with each other and contribute to the overall technological landscape.

Adequate means for easily viewing, browsing and searching knowledge graphs (KGs) are a crucial, still limiting factor. Therefore, this paper aims to present virtual properties as valuable user interface (UI) concept for ontologies and KGs able to improve these issues. Virtual properties provide shortcuts on a KG that can enrich the scope of a class with other information beyond its direct neighborhood.

Virtual properties can be defined as enhancements of shapes constraint language (SHACL) property shapes. Their values are computed on demand via protocol and RDF query language (SPARQL) queries. An approach is demonstrated that can help to identify suitable virtual property candidates. Virtual properties can be realized as integral functionality of generic, frame-based UIs, which can automatically provide views and masks for viewing and searching a KG.

The virtual property approach has been implemented at Bosch and is usable by more than 100,000 Bosch employees in a productive deployment, which proves the maturity and relevance of the approach for Bosch. It has successfully been demonstrated that virtual properties can significantly improve KG UIs by enriching the scope of a class with information beyond its direct neighborhood.

SHACL-defined virtual properties and their automatic identification are a novel concept. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no such approach has been established nor standardized so far.

Exploratory search activities are ubiquitous in various information systems. Much potentially useful or even serendipitous information is discovered during the exploratory search process. Given its irreplaceable role in information systems, exploratory search has attracted growing attention from the information system community. Since few studies have methodically reviewed current publications, researchers and practitioners are unable to take full advantage of existing achievements, which, in turn, limits their progress in this field. Through a literature review, this study aims to recapitulate important research topics of exploratory search in information systems, providing a research landscape of exploratory search.

Automatic and manual searches were performed on seven reputable databases to collect relevant literature published between January 2005 and July 2023. The literature pool contains 146 primary studies on exploratory search in information system research.

This study recapitulated five important topics of exploratory search, namely, conceptual frameworks, theoretical frameworks, influencing factors, design features and evaluation metrics. Moreover, this review revealed research gaps in current studies and proposed a knowledge framework and a research agenda for future studies.

This study has important implications for beginners to quickly get a snapshot of exploratory search studies, for researchers to re-align current research or discover new interesting issues, and for practitioners to design information systems that support exploratory search.

This paper aims to propose a new method to derive custom dynamic cyber risk metrics based on the well-known Goal, Question, Metric (GQM) approach. A framework that complements it and makes it much easier to use has been proposed too. Both, the method and the framework, have been validated within two challenging application domains: continuous risk assessment within a smart farm and risk-based adaptive security to reconfigure a Web application firewall.

The authors have identified a problem and provided motivation. They have developed their theory and engineered a new method and a framework to complement it. They have demonstrated the proposed method and framework work, validating them in two real use cases.

The GQM method, often applied within the software quality field, is a good basis for proposing a method to define new tailored cyber risk metrics that meet the requirements of current application domains. A comprehensive framework that formalises possible goals and questions translated to potential measurements can greatly facilitate the use of this method.

The proposed method enables the application of the GQM approach to cyber risk measurement. The proposed framework allows new cyber risk metrics to be inferred by choosing between suggested goals and questions and measuring the relevant elements of probability and impact. The authors’ approach demonstrates to be generic and flexible enough to allow very different organisations with heterogeneous requirements to derive tailored metrics useful for their particular risk management processes.

This study aims to quantitatively consolidate the research conducted over the past four decades on how internal branding activities drive employee commitment. It summarizes several operationalizations of internal branding and tests the moderating effect of employee’s personal characteristics and job characteristics on the relationship between internal branding and employee commitment.

This paper uses meta-analysis as the research methodology. The analysis includes a sample of 65 studies (from 62 published works), yielding 226 effect sizes (coded into 82 composite effect sizes) over an aggregated sample of 21,706 respondents.

This study finds that brand communication, brand-centered human resource management (HRM), training and development, organizational support and culture, brand-centered leadership and an excellent reward system are the key operationalizations of internal branding. Furthermore, employee’s personal (education, age and gender) and job (tenure, work status and level of customer orientation) characteristics significantly moderate the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

Limited empirical literature on some of the internal branding operationalizations such as brand-centered HRM and rewards has curbed the scope of moderator analysis.

This paper proposes some effective ways of implementing internal branding strategies and provides support for boundary conditions that brand managers should consider to strengthen the impact of internal branding activities on employee commitment.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the few quantitative consolidations of four decades of research on the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.