This paper presents a prototype aimed at enhancing the customer service workflow of Centiro Solutions, focusing on efficiently resolving incidents related to software products and services. Leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM), the prototype enhances information retrieval, problem-solving procedures, and communication alignment with company values. The design process involved an innovation sprint, a collaborative effort between industry and academia, employing methodologies like design-thinking and agile development. Evaluation results indicate several benefits, including cost reduction, improved customer service, and streamlined training for customer service technicians. The paper proposes four hypotheses for future research, including the integration of language models into workflows and the importance of user involvement in developing routines for utilizing language models effectively.

Open data services have emerged as a research field. One important area of investigation within this field is exploration into how sustainable open data markets are created. Contests have become a popular method to propel and catalyse open data service development providing services to such markets. Recent research has identified numerous innovation barriers hampering development adjacent to the contest in developers’ effort to transform contest contributions to viable digital services based on open data. Little is however known about what innovation barriers over time constrain the post-contest process to transform initial innovations to finalized open data services ready for market entry. This paper presents a longitudinal survey of innovation barriers constraining teams performing open data service development after an innovation contest. The survey provides insights into 1) 24 innovation barriers constraining development, 2) a comparison of barrier importance based on team progress, and 3) a conceptualisation of phases structuring the process from contests to market entry, stipulating different innovation barriers impact open data service development. The results contribute to the understanding of how sustainable open data markets emerge and serve as a starting point for investigating how different stakeholders can manage innovation barriers constraining open data service development.

There is an ongoing movement in society to provide open data as an enabler for innovation and growth. As more data is passed on beyond organizational borders to trigger third party development of services, the expectations on what could be developed using open data increase. Developers have been observed to express frustration over different challenges in the wake of open data provision, such as localization issues, lack of quality in data etc. Knowledge and tools are missing to assess available open data. This absence risks ensuring continual improvement of open data markets and the management of hampering gaps between developers’ requests of data and data providers’ provision of data. This paper explores the benefits with open data assessment based on an exploratory single case research design. 

Innovation contests are becoming popular instruments for stimulating development of digital services using open data. However, experience indicates that only a limited number of the results developed during these events become viable digital services attracting a significant user base. To further deepen our understanding of the role, design and function of innovation contests in open data markets, we conducted a survey of the websites of 33 digital innovation contests. The results of the survey show that organizers design digital innovation contests to function as intermediaries for open data innovation. By analyzing the activities performed by organizers we found several examples of how innovation contests support the participants in designing, implementing and providing services after the contests are concluded. We contribute with a key design element and attributes for the post-contest process of digital innovation contests, which adds to existing key design elements. For future research we suggest to further study open data markets and the intermediary role of digital innovation contests. Moreover we propose to develop guidelines and tools for organizers of digital innovation contests to design contests that better meet the needs of a particular open data market.

Governments aim to increase democracy by engaging the public in using open data to develop mobile apps and citizen services. They make information available (open data) and organize innovation contests to stimulate innovation with the goal to make new services available for the public to use. But will the public take on the challenge to both develop and provide services to each other? In this paper we use a case study from public transportation to investigate the motivation for individuals and teams to participate in innovation contests. The results show that the motivation for participating is primarily related to fun and enjoyment. We argue that in order to better meet the goals of open data innovation, governments need to follow through the full service innovation cycle and also care for making citizen coproduction in the execution and monitoring phases fun and enjoyable. Currently there is little chance for participants to make profit on a competitive market so governments need to provide other mechanisms to ensure service provisioning. For future research it is suggested to investigate how the later stages of open data innovation can be supported in order to meet the overall goals of open data innovation.

The sharing economy has been growing continuously in the last decade thanks to the proliferation of internet-based platforms that allow people to disintermediate the traditional commercial channels and to share excess resources and trade with one another effectively at a reasonably low transaction cost. Whereas early peer-to-peer platforms were designed to enable file sharing and goods trading, we recently witness the emergence of a new breed of peer-to-peer platforms that are designed for ordinary service sharing. Ordinary services entail in tangible provisions and are defined as an economic activity that generates immaterial benefits and does not result in ownership of material goods. Based on a structured analysis of 41 internet-based rideshare platforms, we explore and layout the unique characteristics of peer-to-peer service sharing platforms based on three distinct temporal patterns that entail specific consequences for platform use as well as provide insights about their overall design imperative.