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The paper attempts to reflect on user empowerment enabled by three contemporary approaches, namely living labs, open innovation and social computing, as innovation instruments for innovating products and services based on next generation networks (NGNs).

The paper takes the form of a literature review, with limited environmental scanning of web sources, industry news, etc.

User‐centric services can be a catalyst for promoting future service ecosystems over NGN. Open strategies may prove to be profitable avenues for incumbents who may consider the extension of the market from access services into value added services. The living lab perspective, used as an approach of developing NGNs, introduces the opportunity to open new markets in new regions where new products and services can be tested and deployed. Living labs can also be used to go beyond the current “launch‐and‐learn” approach in online social communities to active end‐user participation in the online communities' development process. NGNs may be particularly useful for social computing, by offering incentives to create novel services that are fully created, developed and deployed by users.

This paper argues that user‐led innovation could be a significant paradigm shift for innovating products and services, particularly in the specific context of NGNs. It argues that this focus is lacking today, with most of the attention on specific NGN technology and infrastructure issues.

Mobile computing enables end‐users to create small services on their mobiles and share valuable and context‐aware information with others. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a platform for end‐user generated mobile services – so‐called microservices.

As a key component the authors present a microservice description language for user‐driven mobile service creation and platform‐independent service execution and rendering. The paper also gives insight into the authors' visual authoring tool. The chosen design approach is evaluated in two phases: an intermediate evaluation with a small hands‐on trial and an online survey; and a final laboratory test with 24 test users in total.

The paper provides empirical insights about the methods and motivations of end‐users creating small mobile services. The main purposes of service creation would be mostly to exchange information, stay in contact, and just for fun (on the basis of non‐commercial use). The evaluations also indicate the visual drag and drop approach of putting service blocks together as being the most favored in terms of user satisfaction.

The concepts and findings introduced in this paper will help in designing mobile service authoring environments, which is appealing to software communities/vendors and mobile network operators. The presented platform is, to the authors' knowledge, the first designed and implemented infrastructure enabling end‐user mobile service creation.

Health care ecosystems instantiate different innovation trajectories, driven either by science-/techno-push or user-centric rationales. This article focuses on organization intermediaries (OIs), respectively, active in health care ecosystems driven by science- and techno-push versus user-centric innovation processes; it aims at characterizing their operation and intervention modes. The analysis elaborates on network and content brokerage. Innovation also needs to consider various challenges associated with physical vicinity. The authors check whether territorial anchoring plays a role in brokerage, depending on the innovation model.

The article offers an investigation of eight French organizations matching the definition of OIs and active in different areas of health care-related innovation. It follows a qualitative and abductive research protocol adhering to the precepts of grounded theory.

First, the authors show that content and network brokerage specialize in specific activities in each innovation model. On network brokerage, the authors show that OIs foster the development of communities of practice in the science-/techno-push model, while they nurture communities of innovation in the user-centric model. Services materializing content brokerage are typical consequences of activities performed in each model. The second contribution deals with physical vicinity. In the science-/techno-push model, OIs install a physical space (the “internal” dimension) to support the development of communities of practice, while the “external” dimension copes with agglomeration effects. In the user-centric model, OIs deliver services thanks to the “internal” space; communities of innovation create a leverage effect on the physical space to operate their activities that are supported by “external” network effects.

The originality of the article lies in the description of the alternative roles plaid by organization intermediaries in the science-/techno-push versus user-centric approaches of innovation. In these two approaches, (contents and network) brokerage and physical vicinity play different roles.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing investment decisions in mobile services for profitablity and to become a global leader in mobile services sector.

A two-stage methodology is followed. In the first stage, factors are identified from literature, and are validated with telecommunication domain experts using the t-test. In the second stage, interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is used to understand the complex interrelationships among various factors. Further, MICMAC analysis is performed to analyze the indirect relationships and their effect on different factors by stabilizing the rank based on driving and dependence power. Based on MICMAC analysis, four clusters are identified to aid the policy- and decision-makers.

The major contribution of this research is imposing directions and dominance of various factors to make informed decision-making for investment in mobile services to meet the upcoming demand for mobile services in Indian telecommunication sector.

The applicability of these research findings is limited to emerging telecommunication market.

This paper forms the basis for identifying various factors that act as the driving force for the Indian telecommunication operators to pay special attention toward mobile services, with telecommunication data analytics and developing context-aware services. This paper will aid policy-makers in the government, managers in telecommunication companies and other stakeholders such as content providers, channel partners and application developers to take a lead role in developing appropriate mobile services to meet local needs of Indian users. It will help in developing strategies to collaborate and motivate other stakeholders, including device manufacturers to understand and work collaboratively to become world leader in mobile services.

This paper provides a framework for understanding the various factors that encourage telecommunication companies to establish and invest in mobile services and setup a separate vertical in their organization with a focus on mobile services to meet the future demands of Indian market. Appropriate utilization of telecommunication data analytics, personalization of services, customization in local languages and support for convergent services would encourage adoption of mobile services.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of a user-centric service map to facilitate the visual exploration and monitoring of user context information for proactive market analysis.

The paper supports a context-based market analysis by developing a user-centric service map which comprehensively visualizes a variety of contexts, users, and services. Empirical data were gathered from service descriptions and reviews of 100 mobile application services in the Apple App Store’s lifestyle and healthcare and fitness categories.

The user-centric service map supports the analysis of the context information from using various mobile app services, and can therefore be effectively applied for market-segment analysis and user-value analysis.

The user-centric service map involves implications in terms of multi-disciplinary proactive market orientation and data-driven strategy development, allowing firms to respond to changing market conditions in the mobile business promptly and even preemptively.

The initiative uncovering of latent needs through examining context of use have been an important focus of prior work, but little attempt has been presented in the way of frameworks for converting abundant context data into strategic information. The paper provides new methods and procedures to establish and interpret service maps using flexible visual features.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual analysis on value proposition tools to be used in future empirical research and in building managerial insight. The conceptual analysis focusses on a living lab framework and recent theoretical developments around the concept of value that are reflected in the context of three managerial tools for creating value propositions.

Using abductive reasoning, the descriptions of the tools were analysed as cultural texts, as language-in-use in a social context.

In the context of the living labs approach, the Value Proposition Builder™ (VPB) seems to conflict with the ideas and premises of user-centric innovation processes. In the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC), the co-creation aspect is rather vague, as the enterprise and its offerings are presented as creators of value for the customer. Thus, this tool somewhat contradicts the living lab approach. The People Value Canvas (PVC) is aligned with the service-dominant logic and the premises of living labs. However, all three tools largely neglect a deeper acknowledgement of the role of the wider context, the service ecosystem, and the role of networked actors as resource integrators. Moreover, none of the tools explicitly point out the role of enterprises as intermediaries in constructing invitations for value co-creation.

The paper contributes to the SDL and living labs literature by conceptual analysis on different value proposition tools; the VPB™, the PVC, and the VPC which are relevant for academics as well as practitioners creating new understanding and insights on the connectedness of the living labs framework and SDL as well as their relationship to managerial tools. By identifying the absent elements of S-D logic from managerial value proposition tools, the paper contributes to current discussions by giving attention from scholars towards investigating managerial tools and by providing a new conceptual analysis for future empirical research. The critical analysis of the managerial tools contributes to managerial practice by emphasising the need to consciously evaluate the benefits and failures of tools for developing their organisations.

This work aims to argue that it is possible to address discrimination issues that naturally arise in contemporary audio CAPTCHA challenges and potentially enhance the effectiveness of audio CAPTCHA systems by adapting the challenges to the user characteristics.

A prototype has been designed, called PrivCAPTCHA, to offer privacy-preserving, user-centric CAPTCHA challenges. Anonymous credential proofs are integrated into the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol and the approach is evaluated in a real-world Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) environment.

The results of this work indicate that it is possible to create VoIP CAPTCHA services offering privacy-preserving, user-centric challenges while maintaining sufficient efficiency.

The proposed approach was evaluated through an experimental implementation to demonstrate its feasibility. Additional features, such as appropriate user interfaces and efficiency optimisations, would be useful for a commercial product. Security measures to protect the system from attacks against the SIP protocol would be useful to counteract the effects of the introduced overhead. Future research could investigate the use of this approach on non-audio CAPTCHA services.

PrivCAPTCHA is expected to achieve fairer, non-discriminating CAPTCHA services while protecting the user’s privacy. Adoption success relies upon the general need for employment of privacy-preserving practices in electronic interactions.

This approach is expected to enhance the quality of life of users, who will now receive CAPTCHA challenges closer to their characteristics. This applies especially to users with disabilities. Additionally, as a privacy-preserving service, this approach is expected to increase trust during the use of services that use it.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive proposal for privacy-preserving CAPTCHA challenge adaptation. The proposed system aims at providing an improved CAPTCHA service that is more appropriate for and trusted by human users.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss library transformation and creative approaches in public services.

Using classic business concept and drawing on Cornell University service examples, changing customer demands and library's ability to innovate and respond to customers are assessed. The critical skills needed for library to remain competitive are outlined.

In order for libraries to remain relevant to their customers, they must follow the fundamental rule of business, that is, to supply what is demanded by their market. Library staff skills and library services all have to shift from book‐centric to user‐centric.

As the academic library continues to redefine its role in teaching and research in the digital environment, it needs to leverage its strengths, such as physical space and collections, and to innovate responsive and convenient services.

The ideas presented in this paper are most useful to library managers and leaders as they address service weak points or the design and development of user‐centric, value‐added library services.

Although the concept of transformative gamification is mentioned in previous research, no research has provided a theoretically based explanation of how gamification can lead to transformative change. This paper aims to provide the explanation for the first time by combining storytelling elements with cognitive behavioural therapy logic and incorporating these into a framework to show the process of transformative behaviour change through gamification. The proposed framework not only furthers the theoretical understanding of transformative gamification services but also provides practical insight into design and implication of such services.

This paper is based on critical analysis and synthesis of literature from different fields of research such as transformative service research (TSR), gamification, game studies, social marketing, storytelling and journalism. Ergo, several propositions based on the extensive literature review are proposed and aggregated in a conceptual framework.

This paper argues that apart from game mechanics that are often considered as an inseparable aspect of gamification services, immersive storytelling and a mechanism to encourage reflection are the pivotal components of transformative gamification services. In addition, this paper suggests that although reflection and immersive storytelling are often considered as opposite sides of the spectrum, they can have a synergistic effect once they work in tandem in gamification services.

This paper proposes a novel framework and an operational definition for transformative gamification services. It contributes to TSR, gamification and health promotion research through differentiating this concept from similar concepts, such as mHealth, propelling gamification to a more meaningful and user-centric version and providing service researchers with a practical guide to make use of gamification as a tool to serve TSR.

This paper aims to describe the use of collaborative co‐design activities to advance strategic planning assessment efforts by staff members of the merged (city‐university) Dr Martin Luther King, Jr Library in California's Silicon Valley.

The activities use action research approaches rather than traditional approaches which rely on gathering library‐centric data to assess organizational effectiveness. The paper also reports on staff members' application of Learning 2.0 competencies to co‐create physical places and virtual spaces which enable learning for and with users.

This conversation based approach encourages co‐defining “success” with user constituencies through sustained dialogue that, over time, builds relationships.

In the process, library staff invite, interpret, and apply user generated evidence and insights to co‐create sustainable relationships and concurrently advance systems thinking and workplace information literacy. This “research in practice” initiative extends action research on “thought leadership”.

In development since 2003, this inclusive co‐design approach reflects theoretical and applied insights from researchers in Europe, Australia, and North America, who have worked with US library practitioners to develop user‐centric processes for improving organizational effectiveness and enhancing user efficacy.