Challenges Laying Ahead for Future Digital Enterprises: A Research Perspective

Nowadays, digital enterprises are confronted with disruptive technological advancements in their constant quest for innovation and creativity. In order to evolve towards new forms of enterprises, driven by constant business model transformation, a number of challenges need to be addressed from a research and practice perspective. In this paper, a glimpse of the technological trends and visionary scenarios for Enterprises of the Future is provided, leading to the elaboration of the research challenges along the following dimensions: (a) Collaborative, Real-time, Proactive Business Analytics-as-a-Service, (b) Innovative, Web-based Business Models for New Kinds of Economies, (c) Federated, Innovation-driven Enterprise Collaboration Platforms, (d) Dynamic Discovery and Negotiation of the Intellectual Property Rights’ Flow.

Christopher Tucci, Gianluigi Viscusi

Springer-Verlag Berlin2015

Open source corporate strategy (OSCS)

Juan Andrei Villarroel Fernandez

This doctoral dissertation defines and sheds light on a nascent phenomenon in management, informally referred to as "crowdsourcing". I term this concept Open Source Corporate Strategy, or OSCS, which borrows insights from the open source innovation literature, as well as from the strategy literature. This new concept explains how the firm may incorporate open source principles into its business model, as an effective diversification strategy to gain and sustain competitive advantage, in the context of a globally interconnected society. Firms implementing OSCS make use of a "loose" intellectual property regime to extend their operations outside the formal boundaries of the organization, and orchestrate knowledge work via informal globally distributed communities of practice. Empirical evidence discussed throughout this dissertation shows that these, among others, could be new and important sources of competitive advantage for the firm. Over the last few years we have seen a tremendous increase in the ability of firms to expand operations beyond their boundaries: (1) outside the focal organization, by formally trading knowledge with other organizations external to the firm (Chesbrough 2003, 2006), and more recently, (2) outside the scope of the formal interorganizational fabric, by informally sharing knowledge with external online communities of practice (Lakhani et al., 2007; Villarroel and Tucci 2006). The research developed in this doctoral dissertation was designed to explore this phenomenon, by means of: (1) case studies of firms implementing such open initiatives, (2) computational models of open innovation and open sourcing unveiling their impact on system-level learning performance, complemented by (3) a survey-based study of the online community associated to one such firm-sponsored initiative unveiling the motivation factors that determine participation and contribution performance.

EPFL2008

Digital Business Innovation: roadmap and challenges

Gianluigi Viscusi

The talk will discuss the challenges and a roadmap for digital business innovation for entrepreneurs as well as enterprises. Actually, digital business innovation requires a change of perspective with regard to IT governance and the management of IT infrastructure. This is due to the need to adapt them to the constant evolution and changes in business models, consequent to the digitalization of a company products and services. In particular, the talk will discuss the characteristics of four key types of digital business organisation, resulting from their orientation towards execution or else differentiation. Also, the talk will consider the business models fitting each specific type, showing as well their mapping to a company value chain. The talk is based on insights from the FutureEnterprise project, which aims to deliver a research roadmap on new forms of internet-based enterprise innovation. The focus of the project is on what are defined there as enterprises of the future, that are driven by constant business model transformation and innovation, acting as multi-sided platforms built on - as well as emerging from - digital innovations at the global as well as local level to produce shared value including that beyond monetization.

2015

Open source corporate strategy (OSCS)

Juan Andrei Villarroel Fernandez

EPFL2008