Digital Innovation Platforms Research Articles

Microcredit via digital innovation platforms: its drivers and impact on fish farms' yield and income in Nigeria

PurposeFish farmers in Africa often operate on small-scale culture units, primarily due to poor access to funding and low technology adoption. Digital innovation platforms seek to enhance farmers’ access to finance, production and farmers’ income. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support these claims. Therefore, this study investigated the factors influencing fish farmers’ access to microcredit from digital innovation platforms and the impact of this microcredit on fish farms’ yield and income in Nigeria.Design/methodology/approachA mixed-methods approach was adopted, and data were gathered from 387 fish farmers through a well-structured questionnaire and focus group discussion. The data were analyzed using probit regression and instrumental variable two-stage least squares regression.FindingsThe results revealed that ownership of smartphones, awareness of digital agricultural innovation platforms, farmers’ education, income, fish farming as a primary occupation, cooperative society and extension contacts positively influenced farmers’ access to microcredit from digital innovation platforms. The age of farmers and household size negatively influenced their access to digital microcredit. Digital microcredit positively and significantly impacted fish farms’ yield and farmers’ income.Practical implicationsDigital microcredit significantly increased fish farm yield and income. Therefore, digital innovation platforms should be encouraged and promoted through the creation of awareness about their ability to solve inadequate financing in agriculture by agricultural extension agents.Originality/valueThis study contributes to our understanding of the influencing factors for farmers accessing digital microcredit and how digital microcredit enhances farm yield and income.

Business Analytics and Collaborative Innovation Performance in the ICT Sector

This study aims to investigate the impact of business analytics (BA) capabilities on collaborative innovation, which involves the exchange of ideas and knowledge with external sources on digital innovation platforms. Based on the resource-based view (RBV), BA capabilities were divided into three dimensions: tangible, personal, and intangible. A research model is then developed to describe the relationships among BA capabilities, collaborative innovation capabilities, and collaborative innovation performance. To test the model, data were collected through a questionnaire survey from 167 companies and analyzed using structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that BA tangible capabilities have a positive impact on BA personal and intangible capabilities. Both BA personal and intangible capabilities are positively associated with collaborative innovation capability, which in turn was found to be a strong predictor of collaborative innovation performance. These results demonstrate the positive influence of BA in driving collaborative innovation performance.

Integration of AM process in design cycle of metallic parts: Application to space components

Identified in the European strategy as a key enabling technology, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has a great potential for industries to reshape, improve and optimize product life cycle, with reduced environmental footprint such as material waste in production. Allowing to meet structural and multi-disciplinary requirements with complex freeform design at a much lower weight than high constrained conventional manufacturing, AM can benefit to numerous space applications. Beside manufacturing process development, software and process control are becoming absolutely necessary to support digitalization of industrial workflow. Dedicated tools such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) were introduced in the digital manufacturing chain; however, their development was driven by standard manufacturing processes. Therefore, appropriate design methods for AM must emerge in a fully integrated end-to-end solution to foster and support the growth and competitiveness of AM. In order to support industrialization of AM, the European Space Agency has selected the Design4AM project, based on a strong partnership between Siemens and Sonaca, for “Development of Design Methods for AM including CAD Design, Optimization, FEM Analysis and Manufacturing features”. On one hand, the project aims at combining within a comprehensive end-to-end process, topology optimization, seamless CAD data flows and predictive process simulation in the Siemens’ NX™ and Simcenter™ environments. On the other hand, the integration of dedicated industrial design workflow within the enhanced Siemens Digital Innovation Platform is validated on a relevant ESA space application provided by Sonaca.

Stimulating innovation: Managing peer interaction for idea generation on digital innovation platforms

This study investigates user behaviours in online innovation communities which are enabled by digital technologies, to obtain an understanding of the relationship between user's social interaction and their innovation contribution. The new type of innovation communities enables firms to crowdsource ideas from their users for developing new products and improving existing ones, and to facilitate the interactions among users. From an empirical study which collects a large-scale, quantitative data set from Microsoft's Idea platform of Business Intelligent products, this paper focuses on the amount and diversity of users' social interaction particularly their commenting behaviours on the platform, and uses the number of posted ideas and the number of implemented ideas to capture users' contribution to the firm's innovation development. The findings indicate that the amount of user interaction is positively related to the number of implemented ideas, but has an inverted U-shaped relationship with idea number. Moreover, diverse user interaction encourages idea posting, but is negatively associated with the number of implemented ideas. The findings should provide managerial guidance to firms on incentivising and managing user interaction in online communities in order to improve firms' innovation development.