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Digital transformation (DT) has not only been a major challenge in recent years, it is also supposed to continue to enormously impact our society and economy in the forthcoming decade. On the one hand, digital technologies have emerged, diffusing and determining our private and professional lives. On the other hand, digital platforms have leveraged the potentials of digital technologies to provide new business models. These dynamics have a massive effect on individuals, companies, and entire ecosystems. Digital technologies and platforms have changed the way persons consume or interact with each other. Moreover, they offer companies new opportunities to conduct their business in terms of value creation (e.g., business processes), value proposition (e.g., business models), or customer interaction (e.g., communication channels), i.e., the three dimensions of DT. However, they also can become a threat for a company's competitiveness or even survival. Eventually, the emergence, diffusion, and employment of digital technologies and platforms bear the potential to transform entire markets and ecosystems.
Against this background, IS research has explored and theorized the phenomena in the context of DT in the past decade, but not to its full extent. This is not surprising, given the complexity and pervasiveness of DT, which still requires far more research to further understand DT with its interdependencies in its entirety and in greater detail, particularly through the IS perspective at the confluence of technology, economy, and society. Consequently, the IS research discipline has determined and emphasized several relevant research gaps for exploring and understanding DT, including empirical data, theories as well as knowledge of the dynamic and transformative capabilities of digital technologies and platforms for both organizations and entire industries.
Hence, this thesis aims to address these research gaps on the IS research agenda and consists of two streams. The first stream of this thesis includes four papers that investigate the impact of digital technologies on organizations. In particular, these papers study the effects of new technologies on firms (paper II.1) and their innovative capabilities (II.2), the nature and characteristics of data-driven business models (II.3), and current developments in research and practice regarding on-demand healthcare (II.4). Consequently, the papers provide novel insights on the dynamic capabilities of digital technologies along the three dimensions of DT. Furthermore, they offer companies some opportunities to systematically explore, employ, and evaluate digital technologies to modify or redesign their organizations or business models.
The second stream comprises three papers that explore and theorize the impact of digital platforms on traditional companies, markets, and the economy and society at large. At this, paper III.1 examines the implications for the business of traditional insurance companies through the emergence and diffusion of multi-sided platforms, particularly in terms of value creation, value proposition, and customer interaction. Paper III.2 approaches the platform impact more holistically and investigates how the ongoing digital transformation and "platformization" in healthcare lastingly transform value creation in the healthcare market. Paper III.3 moves on from the level of single businesses or markets to the regulatory problems that result from the platform economy for economy and society, and proposes appropriate regulatory approaches for addressing these problems. Hence, these papers bring new insights on the table about the transformative capabilities of digital platforms for incumbent companies in particular and entire ecosystems in general.
Altogether, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the impact of DT on organizations and markets through the conduction of multiple-case study analyses that are systematically reflected with the current state of the art in research. On this empirical basis, the thesis also provides conceptual models, taxonomies, and frameworks that help describing, explaining, or predicting the impact of digital technologies and digital platforms on companies, markets and the economy or society at large from an interdisciplinary viewpoint.
Traditional organizations are strongly encouraged by emerging digital customer behavior and digital competition to transform their businesses for the digital age. Incumbents are particularly exposed to the field of tension between maintaining and renewing their business model. Banking is one of the industries most affected by digitalization, with a large stream of digital innovations around Fintech. Most research contributions focus on digital innovations, such as Fintech, but there are only a few studies on the related challenges and perspectives of incumbent organizations, such as traditional banks. Against this background, this dissertation examines the specific causes, effects and solutions for traditional banks in digital transformation − an underrepresented research area so far.
The first part of the thesis examines how digitalization has changed the latent customer expectations in banking and studies the underlying technological drivers of evolving business-to-consumer (B2C) business models. Online consumer reviews are systematized to identify latent concepts of customer behavior and future decision paths as strategic digitalization effects. Furthermore, the service attribute preferences, the impact of influencing factors and the underlying customer segments are uncovered for checking accounts in a discrete choice experiment. The dissertation contributes here to customer behavior research in digital transformation, moving beyond the technology acceptance model. In addition, the dissertation systematizes value proposition types in the evolving discourse around smart products and services as key drivers of business models and market power in the platform economy.
The second part of the thesis focuses on the effects of digital transformation on the strategy development of financial service providers, which are classified along with their firm performance levels. Standard types are derived based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), with facade digitalization as one typical standard type for low performing incumbent banks that lack a holistic strategic response to digital transformation. Based on this, the contradictory impact of digitalization measures on key business figures is examined for German savings banks, confirming that the shift towards digital customer interaction was not accompanied by new revenue models diminishing bank profitability. The dissertation further contributes to the discourse on digitalized work designs and the consequences for job perceptions in banking customer advisory. The threefold impact of the IT support perceived in customer interaction on the job satisfaction of customer advisors is disentangled.
In the third part of the dissertation, solutions are developed design-oriented for core action areas of digitalized business models, i.e., data and platforms. A consolidated taxonomy for data-driven business models and a future reference model for digital banking have been developed. The impact of the platform economy is demonstrated here using the example of the market entry by Bigtech. The role-based e3-value modeling is extended by meta-roles and role segments and linked to value co-creation mapping in VDML. In this way, the dissertation extends enterprise modeling research on platform ecosystems and value co-creation using the example of banking.
This paper-based dissertation aims to contribute to the open innovation (OI) and technology management (TM) research fields by investigating their mechanisms, and potentials at the operational level. The dissertation connects the well-known concept of technology management with OI formats and applies these on specific manufacturing technologies within a clearly defined setting.
Technological breakthroughs force firms to continuously adapt and reinvent themselves. The pace of technological innovation and their impact on firms is constantly increasing due to more connected infrastructure and accessible resources (i.e. data, knowledge). Especially in the manufacturing sector it is one key element to leverage new technologies to stay competitive. These technological shifts call for new management practices.
TM supports firms with various tools to manage these shifts at different levels in the firm. It is a multifunctional and multidisciplinary field as it deals with all aspects of integrating technological issues into business decision-making and is directly relevant to a number of core business processes. Thus, it makes sense to utilize this theory and their practices as a foundation of this dissertation. However, considering the increasing complexity and number of technologies it is not sufficient anymore for firms to only rely on previous internal R&D and managerial practices. OI can expanse these practices by involving distributed innovation processes and accessing further external knowledge sources. This expansion can lead to an increasing innovation performance and thereby accelerate the time-to-market of technologies.
Research in this dissertation was based on the expectations that OI formats will support the R&D activities of manufacturing technologies on the operational level by providing access to resources, knowledge, and leading-edge technology. The dissertation represents uniqueness regarding the rich practical data sets (observations, internal documents, project reviews) drawn from a very large German high-tech firm. The researcher was embedded in an R&D unit within the operational TM department for manufacturing technologies. The analyses include 1.) an exploratory in-depth analysis of a crowdsourcing initiative to elaborate the impact on specific manufacturing technologies, 2.) a deductive approach for developing a technology evaluation score model to create a common understanding of the value of selected manufacturing technologies at the operational level, and 3.) an abductive reasoning approach in form of a longitudinal case study to derive important indicator for the in-process activities of science-based partnership university-industry collaboration format. Thereby, the dissertation contributed to research and practice 1.) linkages of TM and OI practices to assimilate technologies at the operational level, 2.) insights about the impact of CS on manufacturing technologies and a related guideline to execute CS initiatives in this specific environment 3.) introduction of manufacturing readiness levels and further criteria into the TM and OI research field to support decision-makers in the firm in gaining a common understanding of the maturity of manufacturing technologies and, 4.) context-specific important indicators for science based university-industry collaboration projects and a holistic framework to connect TM with the university-industry collaboration approach
The findings of this dissertation illustrate that OI formats can support the acceleration of time-to-market of manufacturing technologies and further improve the technical requirements of the product by leveraging external capabilities. The conclusions and implications made are intended to foster further research and improve managerial practices to evolve TM into an open collaborative context with interconnectivities between all internal and external involved technologies, individuals and organizational levels.
Essays on Macroeconomics
(2021)
This dissertation consists of four self-contained papers. Each paper deals with a specific macroeconomic question. The first paper assesses the distributional implications of environmental policies from a general equilibrium macroeconomic perspective. I develop a New-Keynesian model with several types of uncertainties and frictions that incorporates liquidity constrained households. The model is calibrated to match the German economy and the numerical results show that climate policy instruments can be associated with regressive welfare effects. Furthermore, the analysis shows that these effects can be mitigated through an appropriate revenue recycling scheme. The second paper deals with short-run inequality dynamics within a real business cycle model. An empirical evaluation shows that the cyclical components of income inequality, the capital share and real GDP are correlated. We develop tractable representation of common inequality indicators in the general equilibrium model and show that the observed pattern is driven by innovations in the capital share. A Bayesian estimation of the model for the United States with data for the period 1948 to 2017 indicates that the model provides a reasonable fit for the data and successfully replicates the observed pattern of cyclical correlations. The third paper empirically examines the effects of banking regulation on the risk-relationship between sovereigns and banks. Based on a comprehensive data set of the European banking sector, we find that the implementation of the novel European banking regulation framework significantly contributed to a weakening of the risk-link between sovereigns and banks.The fourth paper empirically examines the role of institutional experience for institutional development in transition economies. To capture institutional experience, we develop a novel index, based on historical country records. The results of cross-sectional and panel estimations suggest that institutional experience helps to explain the divergent economic and institutional development in transition economies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Foresight in networks
(2021)
The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the corporate foresight research field by investigating capabilities, practices, and challenges particularly in the context of interorganizational settings and networked organizations informed by the theoretical perspectives of the relational view and dynamic capabilities.
Firms are facing an increasingly complex environment and highly complex product and service landscapes that often require multiple organizations to collaborate for innovation and offerings. Public-private partnerships that are targeted at supporting this have been introduced by policy-makers in the recent past. One example for such a partnership is the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) with multiple Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). The EIT has been initiated by the European Commission in 2008 with the ambition of addressing grand societal challenges, driving innovativeness of European companies, and supporting systemic change. The resulting network organizations are managed similarly to corporations with managers, boards, and firm-like governance structures. EIT Digital as one of the EIT KICs are a central case of this work.
Research in this dissertation was based on the expectation that corporate foresight activities will increasingly be embedded in such interorganizational settings and a) can draw on such settings for the benefit of themselves and b) may contribute to shared visions, trust building and planning in these network organizations. In this dissertation the EIT Digital (formerly EIT ICT Labs) is a central case, supplemented with insights from three additional cases. I draw on the rich theoretical understanding of the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, and particularly the relational view to further the discussion in the field of corporate foresight—defined as foresight in organizations in contrast to foresight with a macro-economical perspective—towards a relational understanding. Further, I use and revisit Rohrbeck’s Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of Firms as conceptual frame for corporate foresight in interorganizational settings. The analyses—available as four individual publications complemented by on additional chapter—are designed as exploratory case studies based on multiple data sources including an interview series with 49 persons, two surveys (N=54, n=20), three supplementary interviews, access to key documents and presentations, and observation through participation in meetings and activities of the EIT Digital. This research setting allowed me to contribute to corporate foresight research and practice by 1) integrating relational constructs primarily drawn from the relational view and dynamic capabilities research into the corporate foresight research stream, 2) exploring and understanding capabilities that are required for corporate foresight in interorganizational and networked organizations, 3) discussing and extending the Maturity Model for network organizations, and 4) to support individual organizations to tie their foresight systems effectively to networked foresight systems.
This thesis offers new insights on the effects of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) for unemployed individuals as a special kind of active labor market program (ALMP) that aims to re-integrate individuals into the labor market via the route of self-employment. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the literature on methods for causal inference when the treatment variable is continuous rather than binary. For example, this is the case when individuals differ in their degree of exposure to a common treatment.
The analysis of the effects of SUS focuses on the main current German program called “Gründungszuschuss” (New Start-Up Subsidy, NSUS) after its reform in 2011. Average Effects on participants' labor market outcomes - as measured by employment and earnings - as well as subjective well-being are estimated mainly based on propensity score matching (PSM) techniques. PSM aims to achieve balance in terms of observed characteristics by matching participants with at least one comparable non-participant in terms of their probability to receive the treatment. This estimation strategy is valid as long as all relevant characteristics that explain selection patterns into treatment are observed and included in the estimation of the propensity score. To make our analysis as credible as possible, we control for a large vector of characteristics as observed through the combination of rich administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency as well as through survey data.
Chapters two to four of this thesis puts special emphasis on aspects regarding (the evaluation of) SUS programs that have received no or only limited attention thus far. The first aspect relates to the interplay of institutional details of the program and its effectiveness. So far, relatively little is known about the importance of SUS program features such as the duration of support. Second, there is no experimental benchmark evaluation of SUS available and thus, the reliability of non-experimental estimation techniques such as PSM is of crucial importance as estimates are biased when relevant confounders are omitted from the analysis. Third, there may be potentially detrimental effects of transitioning into (relatively risky) self-employment on subjective well-being among subsidized founders out of unemployment. These were to remain undetected if the analysis would focus exclusively on labor market outcomes of participants. The results indicate positive long-term effects of SUS participation on employment and earnings among participants. These effects are substantially larger than what estimated before the reform, indicating room for improvement in program design via changes in institutional details. Moreover, non-experimental estimates of treatment effects are remarkably robust to hidden confounding. Regarding subjective well-being, this thesis finds a positive long-run impact on job satisfaction and a detrimental effect on satisfaction with social security. The latter appears to be driven by adverse effects on social insurance contributions.
In chapter five, a novel automated covariate balancing technique for the estimation of causal effects in the context of continuous treatments is derived and assessed regarding its performance compared to other (automated) balancing techniques. Although binary research designs that only differentiate between participants and non-participants of some treatment remain the most-common case in empirical practice, many applications can be adapted to include continuous treatments as well. Often, this will allow for more meaningful estimates of causal effects in order to further improve the design of programs. In the context of SUS, one may further investigate the effects of the size of monetary support or its duration on participants' labor market outcomes. Both Monte-Carlo investigations and analysis of two well-known datasets suggests superior performance of the proposed Entropy Balancing for continuous treatments (EBCT) compared to other existing estimation strategies.
Zufriedenheitsanalysen durch Patientenbefragungen, wie in diesem Fall der neu entwickele und getestet Fragebogen (HNO-PROM), haben drei Säulen. Es kann zum einen eine bessere Patientenbindung geschaffen werden, die Qualität kann gemessen, verglichen und optimiert werden und es kann ein Mitarbeiterleitfaden im Sinne einer „Corporate Identity“ erstellt werden, welcher konkrete Managementimplikationen im Sinne von Handlungsimplikationen enthält. Der Leitgedanke des Qualitätsmanagements ist die Patientenorientierung im Sinne der Patientenzentrierten Medizin. Hierbei sollen nicht nur Wünsche und Bedürfnisse des Patienten erfüllt werden, sondern vorallem auch die Zufriedenheit gemessen und geplant werden. Gleichzeit muss man in diesem Zusammenhang die Behandlung der Patienten als Dienstleistung verstehen und die größtmögliche Zufriedenheit des Patienten als primäres Ziel setzen. Dies führt zu einer Kundenbindung dadurch, dass Patienten sowohl eine gleichbleibende Qualität erwarten können als auch und auch weiche Faktoren ihren Wünschen entsprechen werden. Corporate Identity mit dem Ziel als Unternehmen einheitlich für die Werte und damit die Qualität zu stehen.. Dies ermöglicht, das Wohlbefinden in der Vorstellung der Patienten beginnen zu lassen und dadurch Vertrauen zu schaffen. Alle drei Säulen haben nicht nur die Patientenzufriedenheit zum Ziel, sondern in gleichem Maße auch die Positionierung einer Institution auf dem Gesundheitsmarkt und damit die Verbesserung der Kosten-Nutzen-Rechnung durch ein positives Outcome. Damit fördern Zufriedenheitsanalysen nicht nur die ökonomische Position einer Abteilung, sondern behalten gleichermaßen die ethischen Aspekte einer Arzt-Patienten-Beziehung im Blick.
The ability of a company to innovate and to launch innovation is a critical competitive edge to remain competitive in the 21st century. Large organizations therefore increasingly recognize employees as a significant factor and critical source of innovation. Several studies assert the fact that every employee has to offer certain skills and knowledge and can contribute to innovation. Hence, every employee has a certain ‘entrepreneurial potential’. This potential can be expressed in the form of entrepreneurial behaviour and can occur in many ways, from monopersonal innovation championing to several small scale contributions, where several individuals team up for innovation. To support entrepreneurial behaviour of their employees, large organizations increasingly rely on Corporate Entrepreneurship. They set up organizational structures and venturing units, offer vehicles and tools to their employees to be more entrepreneurial. The evolvement of new tools and technologies thereby allow for new ways of employee involvement, also allowing for more radical innovation to be developed collaboratively. Yet, many of such offerings fail to achieve the desired outcome. While some employees immediately opt-in for innovation, others do not and their entrepreneurial potential remains untapped. This research explores how large organizations can better support their employees to express their entrepreneurial potential, thus moving from non-entrepreneurial behaviour or not wanting to be involved, to actually expressing entrepreneurial behaviour. The underlying research therefore is two-fold. While focusing on the individual level and the entrepreneurial behaviour of employees, this research also takes the organizational perspective into account in order to identify how non-entrepreneurial behaviour can be stimulated towards entrepreneurial behaviour. Using an empirical qualitative research design based on pragmatism and abduction, data is collected by means of qualitative interviews as well as a longitudinal use case setting. Grounded theory is then applied for analysis and sense making. The main outcome is a theoretical model of why employees are expressing or not expressing their entrepreneurial potential and how non-expression can potentially be triggered towards entrepreneurial behaviour. The results indicate that there is no one-size-fits all model of Corporate Entrepreneurship. This research therefore argues that organizations can achieve higher levels of entrepreneurial behaviour when addressing employees differently. By developing a theoretical model as well as suggestions of how this model can be applied in practice, this research contributes to theory and practice alike. This document closes suggesting future research areas around supporting employees to express their entrepreneurial potential.
The business model has emerged as a construct to understand how firms drive innovation through emerging technologies. It is defined as the ‘architecture of the firm’s value creation, delivery and appropriation mechanisms’ (Foss & Saebi, 2018, p. 5). The architecture is characterized by complex functional interrelations between activities that are conducted by various actors, some within and some outside of the firm. In other words, a firm’s value architecture is embedded within a wider system of actors that all contribute to the output of the value architecture.
The question of what drives innovation within this system and how the firm can shape and navigate this innovation is an essential question within innova- tion management research. This dissertation is a compendium of four individual research articles that examine how the design of a firm’s value architecture can fa- cilitate system-wide innovation in the context of Artificial Intelligence and Block- chain Technology. The first article studies how firms use Blockchain Technology to design a governance infrastructure that enables innovation within a platform ecosystem. The findings propose a framework for blockchain-enabled platform ecosystems that address the essential problem of opening the platform to allow for innovation while also ensuring that all actors get to capture their share of the value. The second article analyzes how German Artificial Intelligence startups design their business models. It identifies three distinct types of startup with dif- ferent underlying business models. The third article aims to understand the role of a firm’s value architecture during the socio-technical transition process of Arti- ficial Intelligence. It identifies three distinct ways in which Artificial Intelligence startups create a shared understanding of the technology. The last article exam- ines how corporate venture capital units configure value-adding services for their venture portfolios. It derives a taxonomy of different corporate venture capital types, driven by different strategic motivations.
Ultimately, this dissertation provides novel empirical insights into how a firm’s value architecture determines it’s role within a wider system of actors and how that role enables the firm to facilitate innovation. In that way, it contributes to both business model and innovation management literature.
This thesis puts the citizen-state interaction at its center. Building on a comprehensive model incorporating various perspectives on this interaction, I derive selected research gaps. The three articles, comprising this thesis, tackle these gaps. A focal role plays the citizens’ administrative literacy, the relevant competences and knowledge necessary to successfully interact with public organizations. The first article elaborates on the different dimensions of administrative literacy and develops a survey instrument to assess these. The second study shows that public employees change their behavior according to the competences that citizens display during public encounters. They treat citizens preferentially that are well prepared and able to persuade them of their application’s potential. Thereby, they signal a higher success potential for bureaucratic success criteria which leads to the employees’ cream-skimming behavior. The third article examines the dynamics of employees’ communication strategies when recovering from a service failure. The study finds that different explanation strategies yield different effects on the client’s frustration. While accepting the responsibility and explaining the reasons for a failure alleviates the frustration and anger, refusing the responsibility leads to no or even reinforcing effects on the client’s frustration. The results emphasize the different dynamics that characterize the nature of citizen-state interactions and how they establish their short- and long-term outcomes.