Guest Editorial: Direct Satellite-to-Device Communications: Technologies, Connectivity, and Spectrum Management

The articles in this special section focus on the deployment of Long Term Evolution in unlicensed spectrum. These articles cover various design issues such as network architecture, protocol development, network coexistence, unlicensed spectrum access, and practical implementation. Fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will face a rigorous challenge in the ever increasing data rate requirement. To meet such anticipated data growth demand, the industry and academia have developed many cutting edge techniques to improve spectrum utilization. However, the scarcity of spectral resources is still a fundamental bottleneck for network capacity enhancement. Recently, the rich available bandwidth on the 5.8 GHz unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) spectrum has stimulated substantial interest from cellular operators to use the unlicensed spectrum for LTE. In 2015, the LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) Forum formally launched the LTE-U specification, and the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has pushed the standardization of licensed assisted access (LAA)into its Releases 13 and 14. However, the LTE-U technology is still in its infancy, and there are lots of challenges that need to be solved, such as network coexistence among different radio access technologies, unlicensed spectrum sharing and access, and quality of service (QoS) provision on unlicensed spectrum. This Feature Topic aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this appealing technology, harmonizing recent results and key challenges, as well as highlighting future important directions.

Innovation processes in services remain under-researched, but recently large-scale surveys have been conducted which allow for a more systematic appraisal of the level and scope of innovation in services. To date, much of the literature on innovation in services focuses on the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Innovation in services, and services innovation, should, however, be understood in broader terms, and this understanding should extend to non-technological innovation. This paper presents evidence from a recent large-scale survey of innovation amongst German commercial service firms. It shows that services are much more active with respect to innovation than is widely thought. They are innovative in terms of being producers of service and process innovations. From our broader perspective, we examine the pattern of innovation as it relates to the standardisation-particularisation of service products, across a range of service sectors and across firms of various sizes. The production of bespoke or customised services shaped by client inputs has long been considered a defining characteristic of many services, and one that has affected their innovation potential. The present analysis reveals a pattern of diversity in behaviour, which reflects the diversity amongst service firms, and demonstrates the need for more subtle and differentiated analyses of services and services innovation.

Technology management, networking positions and work/life boundaries among working adult students

We are back this month with a sequel to our May 2015 Feature Topic on Emerging Applications, Services, and Engineering for Cognitive Cellular Systems (EASE for CCS). In this followup, we have eight more articles that present emerging applications integrated with CCS through novel frameworks. These emerging applications include energy harvesting, network virtualization, machine learning approaches, backward-compatible cognition in LTE, self-organization capabilities, integration of vehicular networking over unlicensed spectrum, 2.4/5 GHz hybrid architecture, and integration of D2D communications.

Guest Editorial: The Future of Wi-Fi and Wireless Technologies in Unlicensed Spectra

The papers in this special section tackle technological development for the social good. THE slogan for IEEE is "Advancing Technology for Humanity".Implied within that slogan is the purpose of technology is for social good. Thus, this special issue falls within the spirit of the IEEE. The United Nations has been supporting social good with various goals, initially the millennium goals which evolved to the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs represent 17 major goals covering the three major dimensions of sustainability—environmental, social, and economic goals. The linkages between the SDGs and Industry 4.0 technologies— the latest classification of production technologies— have shown some SDG benefits from these technologies. The importance of social issues and social good is not lost on recent works on technology management. Yet, although the SDGs are about a decade old—they are only just appearing in the technology management and related topics literature.

“The <em>Internet of Life</em>”

Guest Editorial: Introduction to the Special Section on Technology Management in Smart Cities Infrastructure and Applications

The papers in this special section focus on the concept of "tech mining." Here, this term refers to the application of text mining tools to science and technology information, informed by the understanding of technological innovation processes. Since the 1st Global Tech Mining (GTM) Conference in 2010, the GTM community has established great connections between tech mining and a broad range of research domains, particularly bibliometrics, text mining, and technology management. Endeavours of the community touch on benefits of the big data boom, the artificial intelligence (AI) age, advanced analytical and visualization tools, novel philosophical concepts, and reshaped managerial models.

Guest Editorial: Introducing the Special Issue on Technology Management in Metaverse Technology and Applications

The papers in this special issue were submitted to all the conferences organized by IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society (TEMS) in a given calendar year. In 2017, IEEE TEMS initiated its flagship conference TEMSCON (held in Silicon Valley), which serves as rebranding from its original International Technology Management Conferences (ITMC). Following that, in 2018, two more conferences were initiated globally, one in Asia known as IEEE TEMS International Symposium on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ISIE), and one in Europe as IEEE TEMS International Conference on Technology and Entrepreneurship (ICTE). For this special issue, we invited authors attending any of the three aforementioned conferences in 2018 to submit full manuscripts for reviews, and the present special issue with eleven papers is the result of a careful selection following our usual rigid double-blinded peer-review process.

Discussion To the Editor: In their guest editorial, "The Selfish Technology Gene," (April 2008) authors Robert K. Perrons and Lew Watts provide an interesting scenario in which oil and gas companies would keep their technology investments proprietary. Arthur D. Little believes that this oversimplifies the current situation. The industry is characterized by a range of technology strategies (Fig. 1) and, while there may be a shift towards increased proprietary technology, the industry cannot afford to develop all its own technology in-house and will need to think carefully about which technologies should be proprietary. In our work on technology management, we have highlighted that companies need to balance ownership of their technologies with opportunities for value creation from their investments. Keeping technologies proprietary prevents companies from extracting the full value of their technology investments. Shell is a case in point—it has made significant progress in extracting value from its technology investments by making some of these commercially available. Although third-party technology suppliers have not always been responsible for the invention of new technology, they have excelled at refining the technology. While this is often not counted as technological development, it has played a great part in bringing new technologies to the right price point and reliability, something the oil companies could not afford to do on their own. For this reason, we do not see service companies being threatened in the near future. The comparison with investments for a fabrication plant for chip manufacture in the article is unhelpful. Microchip manufacturers keep their technology proprietary because it influences chip design and performance, key factors in an industry in which differentiation and performance are very important. But a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil. Oil and gas E&P companies sell commodity products, and technology investments serve to access resources or reduce production costs. The key area where Arthur D. Little feels that technology will be kept proprietary is in the development of unconventional reserves. This is because there is considerable uncertainty about pay-offs from this area and the potential for technology development. Ben Thuriaux-Alemán, Manager, Arthur D. Little, UK David Thompson, Senior Manager, Global Energy Practice, Arthur D. Little

Tubiquitous ultra-broadband network enabling the future Internet (FI), is not only about new releases of current network generations and services, but, more significantly, will be associated with a true revolution in the information and communications technologies (ICT) field: the network will efficiently and effectively take forward new-fangled services to everyone and everything, such as cognitive objects and cyber physical systems (CPSs). A "full immersive (3D) experience" enriched by "context information" and, in particular, "anything or everything as a service (XaaS)" are the main business drivers for massive adoption and market uptake of the new fundamental enabling technologies, beyond today's "client-server" model, where the network has been reduced to a ubiquitous "pipe of bits." XaaS refers to those services — beyond the current models of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platfore as a service (PaaS), SPI models, of cloud computing — such as data as a service (DaaS), security as a service (again, SaaS), network as a service (NaaS), knowledge as a service (KaaS), machine as a service (MaaS), and robot as a service (RaaS), which could be delivered over the advanced 5G infrastructure, without the need to own hardware, software, or even the cognitive objects themselves. Communication services, such as voice and video telephony, will be enriched and bundled with other services. The network infrastructure is expected to become the "nervous system" of the actual digital society and digital economy. This challenge calls for a complete redesign of services and service capabilities, architectures, interfaces, functions, access and non-access stratum protocols and related procedures, as well as advanced algorithms (e.g., for unified connection, security, mobility and routing management, and reconfiguration of ICT services; and any type of resource of cyber physical systems). The expected transformation will be especially true at the edge, that is, around the end user (or prosumer), where the "intelligence" already started migrating a few years ago, and where massive processing, memory, and storage capacity are gradually accumulating.

Guest editor’s introduction to the special issue: entrepreneurship and strategic management in new technology based companies

Machine learning and artificial intelligence can harness the immense stream of operational data from clouds, to services, to social and communication networks. In the era of big data and connected devices of all varieties, machine learning and artificial intelligence have found ways to improve operations and management of information technology and communications.