Search results

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of social media-based promotion (personal relevance, interactivity, message, brand familiarity) to consumer purchasing decision of Batik Jambi in the Asean Economic Community (AEC) era.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The sample in this study amounted to 90 people. The type of research used is explanatory research. The hypothesis itself were tested with multiple linear regression equations using the tool SPSS 21.0 for Windows.

Findings – The results of this research in which the variable of personal relevance, interactivity, message, and brand familiarity are able to explain the variable of purchasing decision is equal to 82.9%. Variables of personal relevance, interactivity, message, and brand familiarity have a significant influence on purchasing decisions either partially or simultaneously, while the message has a more dominant influence on purchasing decisions.

Research Limitations/Implications – The model significantly explains all the variables but in the future needs more testing for other variables to make the model more precise.

Practical Implications – The most dominant influence of social media-based promotional variables (personal revelance, interactivity, messege, brand familiarity) on consumer purchasing decision of Jambi’s Batik in Jambi City are analyzed.

Originality/Value – Increasing understanding about social media-based promotions to consumer purchasing decisions on Jambi’s Batik in AEC era.

The sustainable transition towards the circular economy requires the effective use of artificial intelligence (AI) and information technology (IT) techniques. As the sustainability targets for 2030–2050 increasingly become a tougher challenge, society, company managers and policymakers require more support from AI and IT in general. How can the AI-based and IT-based smart decision-support tools help implementation of circular economy principles from micro to macro scales?

This chapter provides a conceptual framework about the current status and future development of smart decision-support tools for facilitating the circular transition of smart industry, focussing on the implementation of the industrial symbiosis (IS) practice. IS, which is aimed at replacing production inputs of one company with wastes generated by a different company, is considered as a promising strategy towards closing the material, energy and waste loops. Based on the principles of a circular economy, the utility of such practices to close resource loops is analyzed from a functional and operational perspective. For each life cycle phase of IS businesses – e.g., opportunity identification for symbiotic business, assessment of the symbiotic business and sustainable operations of the business – the role played by decision-support tools is described and embedding smartness in these tools is discussed.

Based on the review of available tools and theoretical contributions in the field of IS, the characteristics, functionalities and utilities of smart decision-support tools are discussed within a circular economy transition framework. Tools based on recommender algorithms, machine learning techniques, multi-agent systems and life cycle analysis are critically assessed. Potential improvements are suggested for the resilience and sustainability of a smart circular transition.

Strategy scholars have widely recognized the central role that narratives play in the construction of organizational identities. Moreover, storytelling is an important strategic asset that firms can leverage to inspire employees, excite investors and engage customers' attention. This chapter illustrates how advancements in computational linguistic may offer opportunities to analyze the stylistic elements that make a story more convincing. Specifically, we use a topic model to examine how narrative conventionality influences the performance of 78,758 craftsmen selling their handmade items in the digital marketplace of Etsy. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective narratives display enough conventional features to align with audience expectations, yet preserve some uniqueness to pique audience interest. By elucidating our approach, we hope to stimulate further research at the interface of style, language and strategy.

Utility strikes have spawned companies specializing in providing a priori analyses of the underground. Geophysical techniques such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) are harnessed for this purpose. However, analyzing GPR data is labour-intensive and repetitive. It may therefore be worthwhile to amplify this process by means of Machine Learning (ML). In this work, harnessing the ADR design science methodology, an Intelligence Amplification (IA) system is designed that uses ML for decision-making with respect to utility material type. It is driven by three novel classes of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for this purpose, which yield accuracies of 81.5% with outliers of 86%. The tool is grounded in the available literature on IA, ML and GPR and is embedded into a generic analysis process. Early validation activities confirm its business value.

This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production.

Purpose – This study aims to determine the roles of technology through digital democracy in younger generation’s political education.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Research data were obtained through observation, interviews on students in Universitas Malikussaleh, and also retrieved from some literature studies that are relevant to the above research problems. Data are then analyzed by using qualitative descriptive analysis technique.

Findings – The research results show that the role of political activity using digital channels as a form of political participation gives positive impacts to the political participation of young generation.

Research Limitations/Implications – This research limits the scope of attention only on young generation’s participation in political activities.

Practical Implications – The necessity of the younger generation is to be given wider opportunities and responsibilities in the public sphere as well as involving as a member of a political party, or other social and political organization.

Originality/Value – Therefore, in order to push towards political democratization, political education agents must be able to utilize social networking media on the internet to convey ideas, actions, and other political activities for the development of political education.

The 2013 Central European floods were not only one of the most severe natural disasters in Austria in the last decades, but also constituted a landmark in crisis communication. For the first time, social media and online newspapers were important news channels, creating a need for new crisis communication strategies. Based on 20 semi-structured interviews and an analysis of online data, we reconstruct in this chapter the online communication of different stakeholders such as the authorities, rescue organisations and journalists during this emergency situation. The study shows that the use of social media was a weak point in official crisis communication. Through detailed analyses of information flows and the requirements of different stakeholders, the study reveals new challenges and possibilities for crisis communication in the digital age.