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As overconsumption has negative effects on ecological balance, social equality, and individual well-being, reducing consumption levels among the materially affluent is an emerging strategy for sustainable development. Today's youth form a crucial target group for intervening in unsustainable overconsumption habits and for setting the path and ideas on responsible living. This article explores young people's motivations for engaging in three behavioural patterns linked to anti-consumption (voluntary simplicity, collaborative consumption, and living within one's means) in relation to sustainability. Applying a qualitative approach, laddering interviews reveal the consequences and values behind the anti-consumption behaviours of young people of ages 14 to 24 according to a means-end chains analysis. The findings highlight potential for and the challenges involved in motivating young people to reduce material levels of consumption for the sake of sustainability. Related consumer policy tools from the fields of education and communication are identified. This article provides practical implications for policy makers, activists, and educators. Consumer policies may strengthen anti-consumption among young people by addressing individual benefits, enabling reflection on personal values, and referencing credible narratives. The presented insights can help give a voice to young consumers, who struggle to establish themselves as key players in shaping the future consumption regime.
Digitizing grocery retailing
(2021)
Multiple emerging technologies both threaten grocers and offer them attractive opportunities to enhance their value propositions, improve processes, reduce costs, and therefore generate competitive advantages. Among the variety of technological innovations and considering the scarcity of resources, it is unclear which technologies to focus on and where to implement them in the value chain. To develop the most probable technology forecast that addresses the application of emerging technologies in the grocery value chain within the current decade, we conduct a two-stage Delphi study. Our results suggest a high relevance of almost all technologies. The panel is only skeptical about three specific projections. As a consequence, grocers are advised to build up knowledge regarding the application of these technologies in the most promising areas of their value chain.
Firms increasingly use ideas from online innovation communities to solve problems or to better address customer needs. However, in many cases the number of submitted ideas has exploded, it leads to an information overload that firms hardly can handle considering their limited cognitive resources. Therefore, we use the Elaboration Likelihood Model to distinguish between the quick and lean idea preselection process as a peripheral route of information processing and the subsequent idea review process as a central route of information processing. In our empirical study with a sample of more than 163,000 ideas collected from the Xiaomi MIUI community, we analyse influencing factors that increase the likelihood of ideas being preselected or reviewed. Results show that user status, user initiative contribution, and community recognition have a significantly positive influence on idea preselction, whereas user response contribution has no influence. Idea presentation characteristics have an inverted U-curve relationship with idea adoption. Community absorptive capacity has a moderate effect on the curvilinear relationship between idea description length and idea adoption.
The design of qualitative, excellent teaching requires collaboration between teachers and learners. For this purpose, face-to-face teaching benefits from a long-standing tradition, while digital teaching is comparatively still at the beginning of its dissemination. A major developmental step toward the digitization of teaching was achieved in the context of university teaching during the Covid 19 pandemic in spring 2020, when face-to-face teaching was interrupted for months. During this time, important insights into the opportunities and limitations of digital teaching were gained. This paper presents selected results of a study conducted at four German universities and with 875 responses in spring 2020. The study uncovers opportunities and limitations of digital teaching from the students’ perspective and against the background of their experience in the completely digital semester. The results are used as a basis for deriving design guidelines for digital teaching and learning offerings. Based on a model for analyzing the design of teaching and learning formats, these indications are structured according to the elements learners, teachers, teaching content, environment and teaching style.
The increasing demand for software engineers cannot completely be fulfilled by university education and conventional training approaches due to limited capacities. Accordingly, an alternative approach is necessary where potential software engineers are being educated in software engineering skills using new methods. We suggest micro tasks combined with theoretical lessons to overcome existing skill deficits and acquire fast trainable capabilities. This paper addresses the gap between demand and supply of software engineers by introducing an actionoriented and scenario-based didactical approach, which enables non-computer scientists to code. Therein, the learning content is provided in small tasks and embedded in learning factory scenarios. Therefore, different requirements for software engineers from the market side and from an academic viewpoint are analyzed and synthesized into an integrated, yet condensed skills catalogue. This enables the development of training and education units that focus on the most important skills demanded on the market. To achieve this objective, individual learning scenarios are developed. Of course, proper basic skills in coding cannot be learned over night but software programming is also no sorcery.
For the last 20 years, enterprise architecture management (EAM) was primarily an instrument for harmonizing and consolidating IT landscapes and is lived as a transformation and governance discipline. It, however, is rather related to IT strategy than aligned to the actual corporate strategy and the work of the enterprise architect is characterized by tasks like prescribing, monitoring, documenting, and controlling. As digital transformation continues apace, companies are facing new challenges that lead to a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. To face these challenges, vision, understanding, clarity and agility allow to anticipative and implement necessary changes. This, of course, has implications for the role of the enterprise architect. S/he needs to start actively supporting innovation and taking more of an advisory role instead of just being driven by the current state of the enterprise architecture. This paper investigates the role of the enterprise architect in the VUCA world. Based on current literature and expert interviews, a survey was conducted among consultants who work as (or with) enterprise architects. Survey results include the evaluation of statements on current tasks of enterprise architects, their influence on projects and companies as well as future requirements on the roles of the enterprise architect. The results from the survey were synthesized with the findings from literature to derive the roles, tasks and skills of enterprise architect in the VUCA world.
Family businesses strive not only for economic prosperity but also for social and environmental values and achievements. In an ever-changing business environment, dynamic capabilities are required to sustain performance across these areas. To understand these mechanisms in order to proactively manage them, it is necessary to identify their specific microfoundations and uncover how these relate to sustainability. However, research on sustainability dynamic capabilities in family businesses and their microfoundations is scarce. To address this research gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 German and Swiss family businesses from different industries of different ages and sizes. Our findings suggest that the majority of dynamic capability microfoundations relate to economic sustainability, with a specific focus on future orientation, traditional mindsets, rapid decision-making, intuition, speed, and resource slack. Further, we find the social aspects of innovative mindsets, human capital investments, and participation to be the specific microfoundations that strongly link with social and, eventually, economic sustainability. However, we did not find specific microfoundations for environmental sustainability.
Digitization and demographic change are enormous challenges for companies. Learning factories as innovative learning places can help prepare older employees for the digital change but must be designed and configured based on their specific learning requirements. To date, however, there are no particular recommendations to ensure effective age-appropriate training of bluecollar workers in learning factories. Therefore, based on a literature review, design characteristics and attributes of learning factories and learning requirements of older employees are presented. Furthermore, didactical recommendations for realizing age-appropriate learning designs in learning factories and a conceptualized scenario are outlined by synthesizing the findings.
Human resource management (HRM) reform has not been the focus of attention in Germany despite its obvious relevance for effective policy implementation. Although there is a general trend worldwide towards convergence between public and private HRM strategies and practices, management of the workforce in German public administration still remains largely traditional and bureaucratic. This chapter describes and analyses German practices regarding the central functions and elements of HRM such as planning, recruitment, training and leadership. Furthermore, it explores the importance and contribution of public service motivation, performance-related pay and diversity management in the context of German practices. The chapter concludes by highlighting some of the major paradoxes of German public HRM in light of current challenges, such as demographic change, digital transformation and organisational development capabilities.
Technological change and development have been ongoing in the motion picture industry since its beginnings some 125 years ago. What further advancements of digitalization can be expected over the next decade and what are its implications for the industry’s value chain? To answer this question, we conducted an international two-stage Delphi study. The results suggested a more frequent use of smartphones as cameras, the emergence of full digital film sets and digital star avatars, as well as advancements in VR-based and interactive movies. The findings imply challenges for traditional players in the motion picture value chain. Production technology becomes both simpler and more complex, leading to the threat of new entrants.