Ecosystem Stakeholders Research Articles

What innovations would enable the tourism and hospitality industry in India to re-build?

PurposeThe aim of the paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities that the Indian Tourism and Hospitality faces to rebuild itself. The questions discussed include: what is to be done, the role of the Government at the Federal and Provincial level and how should the stakeholders of the tourism ecosystem play out?Design/methodology/approachThe 2020 expectation for Indian Tourism was for a bumper year, a year that would be remembered, but then the pandemic proved to be devastating. This article is based on secondary literature and discussions with industry representatives, which provide guidance and pointers for future preparedness.FindingsThe industry went from a difficult situation during the lockdowns, to a scenario of hope and opportunity initiated by domestic travellers, who provided a ray of hope for tourism stakeholders.Social implicationsIn the wake of the pandemic, businesses suffered from a lack of business; people lost jobs, travel came to a standstill and so it was mitigation that was important. The way the tourism ecosystem sought to return to normal and build on it for future has a number of implications for relevant changes to society.Originality/valueResilience, restructuring and renewal have characterised the tourism business in India and this paper investigates new dimensions for innovatively managing the situation.

Towards the Regional Aspects of Institutional Trust and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Institutional trust is considered to be vital for social and economic activity and is also crucial in reducing uncertainty for entrepreneurs and society. To shed light on the role of institutional trust and determine the extent to which entrepreneurial activity is productive or destructive, this paper analyses the impact of six distinct urban EEs using the contexts of the transition economies of Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia. This paper posits that the paucity of formal institutions and lack of institutional trust in the context of transition countries may inhibit productive entrepreneurship and affect entrepreneurs’ decision-making. Using a mixed-method approach, this study pursues the research question: what role does institutional trust play in the relationship between formal institutions and productive entrepreneurship in the entrepreneurial ecosystems of transition economies? Our dataset includes 657 respondents (ecosystem stakeholders) from six city-level entrepreneurial ecosystems in the transition economies of Georgia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, as well as 51 semi-structured interviews from EE representative stakeholders to examine the validity of our findings. Our results suggest that institutional trust and formal institutions should be considered as complementary for a better understanding of their impact on productive entrepreneurship.

Creating Bonding and Bridging Social Capital in Nascent Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems are characterized by the lack of connections and interactions between various actors and have, therefore, weak social capital. To advance the evolutionary stage of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, interconnectedness among ecosystem stakeholders needs to be strengthened and diversified. While the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature emphasizes the importance of social capital for entrepreneurial ecosystem development, it has not paid sufficient attention to ‘how’ social capital is created within ecosystems. This study sheds light on the role of anchor tenants, central actors in the ecosystem governance of nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems, in creating ecosystem-level social capital. This study conducted two case studies of entrepreneurial ecosystems: Based on the within- and between-case analyses of these two ecosystems, this study revealed that anchor tenants create ecosystem-level social capital with a cycling mechanism of three consecutive steps: (1) creating bonding social capital, (2) creating bridging social capital, and (3) converting bridging into bonding social capital. The findings extend the current understandings of early ecosystem evolution by illuminating anchor tenants’ social capital creation activities and offer implications for social capital theory by examining the interplay between bonding and bridging social capital.

Lessons Learned: Academia's tryst with the pandemic-mental and physical health impacts

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic brought various changes in the manner we work and the teaching-learning profession is not an exception. It is essential to understand the impact which the pandemic has had on the physical and mental well-being of the major stakeholders of the academic ecosystem. Objectives: This study discusses the condition of educational institutes due to the pandemic and its impact on the mental and physical well-being of the faculty members and students. Research Methodology: In order to understand the viewpoint of the students and faculty primary data collection was undertaken in graduate and postgraduate colleges in four Indian states namely Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. There are approximately seven to eight thousand colleges in these four states which offer graduate and post-graduate courses. More than 80,000 students’ study in these colleges. Due to the pandemic, it was not feasible to collect data from all of the colleges. In total, 25 colleges were contacted from these four states. Hence, the method of convenience sampling was used to collect the data. A structured questionnaire was designed and distributed to 1,750 students. 1,500 undergraduate and post-graduate students completed the questionnaire (85.7% response rate). From the same institutes, around 715 faculty were given a questionnaire to complete about issues faced in shifting to online teaching from offline teaching due to COVID-19. 600 faculty members completed the questionnaire (83.9% response rate). Results: According to the findings, online learning has progressed but is resulting in a rise in loneliness and isolation among students and teachers. When one-on-one communication between instructors and students is disrupted, the majority of students felt isolated, which can lead to poor mental and physical health in pandemics. Conclusion: Research outcomes can help institute, university, and policymakers in designing effective mental and physical health policies or developing programs to mitigate the negative effects of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings can help researchers discover that mental health is just as vital as physical health. *(The paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Embracing Change & Transformation Innovation and Creativity 26-28 May 2022)

Factors for collaboration amongst smart city stakeholders: A local government perspective

A collaborative ecosystem of diverse stakeholders is seen as critical in smart cities for solving complex public problems and overcoming socio-technical hurdles. However, little is known about the factors that may increase collaboration amongst smart city stakeholders. Through a digital government lens, we first elaborate the nature of multi-stakeholder collaboration in the smart city. Then, we adopt a contingency approach to unpack the factors that affect the intensity of collaboration between the stakeholders in the smart city ecosystem. To characterize the ecosystem, we use the quadruple-helix framework. Through the perspective of the local government, we derive hypotheses on whether certain factors lead to more intensive collaboration, which are tested on a sample of Belgian municipalities. Our findings reveal the importance of smart city strategies for intensifying collaboration between the local government and stakeholders in the ecosystem. Moreover, we also find that for large ecosystems, a smart city manager or department may facilitate collaboration amongst stakeholders. Taken together, our findings indicate that there are certain configurational approaches to increasing collaboration in smart cities, which will depend on the context of a city.

Cushioning the Covid-19 Economic Consequences on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: The Role of Stakeholders` Engagement, Collaboration, and Support

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 (corona virus) disruptions have necessitated a new way of thinking about how entrepreneurship and its environments (ecosystems) function in times of heightened uncertainty. Based on a sample of 237 entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) stakeholders in Tanzania – an emerging economy, we examine the pandemic economic consequences steered by government countermeasures on the EE-perceived quality and performance. We further examined the role played by EE stakeholders` engagement, collaboration, and support during the crisis. Our structural equation model results suggest that strictness of government counter measures for containment of the current pandemic predicament has a bearing on EE- perceived quality and performance by fueling EE vulnerability via amplifying the magnitude of the negative effects. We further find that stakeholders` engagement and collaboration play a significant role in improving the EE-perceived quality and slowing down EE-vulnerability. We conclude by providing the implications and avenues for future research.

Watch Over Your TV: A Security and Privacy Analysis of the Android TV Ecosystem

The rapid adoption of Smart TVs has resulted in them becoming another app-based ecosystem. In this context, Android TV is one of the major players as it is widely available across multiple TV manufacturers and has a high integration with other Google products. Yet, the Android TV ecosystem has remained unexplored. This paper presents a deep analysis of the Android TV ecosystem using a large dataset of TV apps. We give an insight into the stakeholder ecosystem, including developers, streaming services, and thirdparty libraries. We analyze the behavior of TV apps in terms of sensitive data collection and communication with other devices using a pipeline of static analysis tools, network traffic collection, and verification via manual analysis. We compare the mobile and TV version of popular streaming apps and found a significant degradation of TV apps in terms of quality and different data collection practices. Our study shows that most TV apps present potentially harmful behaviors, and in most cases, these can be attributed to tracking and advertisement services. We found a prevalence of static identifiers for tracking purposes despite this not being the recommendation. This finding suggests that Google’s new policies limiting advertising identifiers will not have a tangible effect on the TV ecosystem.

Culture-led urban regeneration and local expectations of urban void renewal in eastern Lisbon

This article will analyze the ongoing culture-led regeneration processes of abandoned, informal and vacant areas, often considered by residents, local associations, and public officials to be urban voids. Our territorial framework is in Marvila, a semi-peripheral riverside area in Lisbon, strongly affected by informal activities, high levels of youth unemployment, an elderly population, and the existence of urban spaces with non-planned uses, seen as undesirable by the local ecosystem of stakeholders and particularly by residents. Our analysis will be centered around a social and spatial understanding of Lisbon’s municipal urban policy (funded by the 3.5.6. program of the European Union on Cultural Heritage), which has supported the reoccupation of some these so-called urban voids. We will focus on the use of a Pilot Project methodology, its exploratory and prototype nature, the local bureaucratic planning system, and the soft Planning techniques implemented as new ways of addressing long-term decayed and informal urban spaces. We will examine the regeneration results of two EU-H2020 funded pilot projects, under the ROCK project, which supports this research. The first pilot project “Loja Com Vida” (“store with life” or “store invites”), supports the municipal objective of creating a new urban centrality in Marvila, encouraging a diversification of its users, operationalizing the reuse of municipal ground floor spaces. The second project, “Jardim para Todos” (‘Garden for all’), corroborates a municipal urban policy on environmental sustainability goals, promoting, with the help of local agents, a learning and sharing process centered around green knowledge and the creation of a future agriculture hub and leisure area. The acknowledgment of these pilot project results will constitute an interesting case study for other urban areas with similar conditions, incorporating a better understanding of participative urban regeneration processes, outside the traditional and formal planning perspectives and achievements.

FAIRness for FHIR: Towards Making Health Datasets FAIR Using HL7 FHIR.

Medical data science aims to facilitate knowledge discovery assisting in data, algorithms, and results analysis. The FAIR principles aim to guide scientific data management and stewardship, and are relevant to all digital health ecosystem stakeholders. The FAIR4Health project aims to facilitate and encourage the health research community to reuse datasets derived from publicly funded research initiatives using the FAIR principles. The 'FAIRness for FHIR' project aims to provide guidance on how HL7 FHIR could be utilized as a common data model to support the health datasets FAIRification process. This first expected result is an HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide (IG) called FHIR4FAIR, covering how FHIR can be used to cover FAIRification in different scenarios. This IG aims to provide practical underpinnings for the FAIR4Health FAIRification workflow as a domain-specific extension of the GoFAIR process, while simplifying curation, advancing interoperability, and providing insights into a roadmap for health datasets FAIR certification.

Extended contextual validation of stakeholder approach to firm technology adoption: moderating and mediating relationships in an innovation eco-system

PurposeThe need for context-specific adoption models led to the development of the firm technology adoption model (F-TAM) model. Among small to medium-scale enterprises (SMEs); however, firm-level factors were rather insignificant in engendering SME level adoption of technological innovation. This study aims to examine the effect of firm size and other moderating and mediating factors on the relationships between personal, firm, societal and technological factors proposed in the stakeholder-oriented F-TAM among SMEs.Design/methodology/approachA research instrument was developed, reviewed by experts, and pilot tested with a sample of 25 respondents. Data were purposively collected from four hundred (400) SMEs and analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).FindingsThe study discovered that employees, societal and technological factors moderate the relationship between firm factors of adoption and firm adoption. Without these moderating effects, firm factors of adoption would have been insignificant at the SMEs’ level of organizational technology adoption. The study further discovered that firm size, as well as risk propensity, also affect the relationships proposed in the model.Research limitations/implicationsData was collected on voluntary adoption from the most cosmopolitan area of a developing country. It, therefore, needs further contextual validation across the country and different countries.Practical implicationsThe engagement of innovations in firms must be planned with employees and society as major stakeholders.Originality/valueThe significance of this finding is the study’s emphasis on an eco-system approach for examining the phenomenon of innovation adoption. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the effect of firm characteristics on is proposed eco-system of stakeholders.

Towards the Smart Circular Economy Paradigm: A Definition, Conceptualization, and Research Agenda

The digital age we live in offers companies many opportunities to jointly advance sustainability and competitiveness. New digital technologies can, in fact, support the incorporation of circular economy principles into businesses, enabling new business models and facilitating the redesign of products and value chains. Despite this considerable potential, the convergence between the circular economy and these technologies is still underinvestigated. By reviewing the literature, this paper aims to provide a definition and a conceptual framework, which systematize the smart circular economy paradigm as an industrial system that uses digital technologies during the product life-cycle phases to implement circular strategies and practices aimed at value creation. Following this conceptualization, the classical, underlying circular economy principle, ‘waste equals food’, is reshaped into an equation more fitting for the digital age—that is to say, ‘waste + data = resource’. Lastly, this paper provides promising research directions to further develop this field. To advance knowledge on the smart circular economy paradigm, researchers and practitioners are advised to: (i) develop research from exploratory and descriptive to confirmatory and prescriptive purposes, relying on a wide spectrum of research methodologies; (ii) move the focus from single organizations to the entire ecosystem and value chain of stakeholders; (iii) combine different enabling digital technologies to leverage their synergistic potential; and (iv) assess the environmental impact of digital technologies to prevent potential rebound effects.

Social Value Assessment and Spatial Expression of National Park Ecosystems Based on Residents’ Perceptions

Social values of ecosystem services originate from human perceptions of ecosystem services and are defined as non-market values perceived by ecosystem stakeholders. Although it is widely recognized that the information of social value can provide assistance to stakeholders and decision makers in environmental management, this issue has received far less attention. This article uses the Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) method to analyze the assessment of social values of national park ecosystem services by residents with different environmental values and their relationship with surrounding natural resource conditions. According to the preference of the interviewed residents, it was found that the four most important types of social value are biodiversity value, aesthetic value, economic value, and recreation and wellness value. In terms of spatial distribution, the hot spots of social values show a pattern of “two cores and multiple centers”. The “two cores” are the Gutianshan National Nature Reserve and Qianjiangyuan National Forest Park, which are located at the north and south ends of the national park; the “multiple centers” include Kukeng, Xikeng, Xiachuan, Gaotiankeng villages in Changhong Township and Longkeng Village in the Hetian Township. By analyzing the relationship between the four social value types with higher preference and the resource environment (land use and elevation), the article found that social values are closely related to scenic spots, river water surface, reservoir water surface, forested land, tea plantations, and villages, and that they are mostly distributed in the range of 400 m to 600 m above sea level. The distribution of social values in the ecocentric subgroup is larger, covering almost the entire national park area. The transition of the value index is smoother, while the distribution of social values in the anthropocentric subgroup is relatively concentrated in one area.

Transformed Health Ecosystems-Challenges for Security, Privacy, and Trust.

A transformed health ecosystem is a multi-stakeholder coalition that collects, stores, and shares personal health information (PHI) for different purposes, such as for personalized care, prevention, health prediction, precise medicine, personal health management, and public health purposes. Those services are data driven, and a lot of PHI is needed not only from received care and treatments, but also from a person’s normal life. Collecting, processing, storing, and sharing of the huge amount of sensitive PHI in the ecosystem cause many security, privacy, and trust challenges to be solved. The authors have studied those challenges from different perspectives using existing literature and found that current security and privacy solutions are insufficient, and for the user it is difficult to know whom to trust, and how much. Furthermore, in today’s widely used privacy approaches, such as privacy as choice or control and belief or perception based trust does not work in digital health ecosystems. The authors state that it is necessary to redefine the way privacy and trust are understood in health, to develop new legislation to support new privacy and approaches, and to force the stakeholders of the health ecosystem to make their privacy and trust practices and features of their information systems available. The authors have also studied some candidate solutions for security, privacy, and trust to be used in future health ecosystems.

Effectiveness of the Digital and Technological Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in Cameroon

This study aims to investigate the factors associated with the effectiveness of the technological and digital entrepreneurship ecosystem (ECOTECH) in Cameroon. The methodology adopted consists of a range of semi-structured interviews in the ecosystem stakeholders. This was followed by a Pearson correlation analysis of a questionnaire submitted to 117 start-ups. The main results indicate that, the Cameroonian ECOTECH is a young and weakly effective environment. As far as start-ups are concerned, administrative difficulties, the distraction effect (increased involvement in activities not directly related to that of the start-up), and the lack of professionalism are closely linked to their ineffectiveness. Regarding the role of the state, start-ups value at 42.52% effective the efforts made by the government in improving the regulatory framework. The prevalence of the informal sector and the lack of infrastructure are among the reasons of this result. Regarding the role of incubators, although they have limited financial means to carry out their actions, start-ups rate their effectiveness at 63.5%. This result can be explained, among other things, by the interest for start-ups in the technical support and lobbying offered by incubators

Innovative Ecosystem Model of Vaccine Lifecycle Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely tested humanity, revealing the need to develop and improve the medical, economic, managerial, and IT components of vaccine management systems. The vaccine lifecycle includes vaccine research and development, production, distribution, and vaccination of the population. To manage this cycle effectively the proper organizational and IT support model of the interaction of vaccine lifecycle management stakeholders is needed—which are an innovation ecosystem and an appropriate virtual platform. A literature review has revealed the lack of methodological basis for the vaccine innovation ecosystem and virtual platform. This article is devoted to the development of a complex approach for the development of an innovation ecosystem based on vaccine lifecycle management and a virtual platform which provides the data exchange environment and IT support for the ecosystem stakeholders. The methodological foundation of the solution, developed in the article, is an enterprise architecture approach, CALS technologies, supply chain management and an open innovation philosophy. The results, presented in the article, are supposed to be a reference set of models for the creation of a vaccine innovation ecosystem, both during pandemics and periods of stable viral load.

Role of Cultural Dimensions and Dynamic Capabilities in the Value-based Performance of Digital Healthcare Services

• Cultural dimensions of the country can be regarded as antecedents of dynamic capabilities of the healthcare providers • A specific set of cultural dimensions and dynamic capabilities of healthcare providers tend to contribute to value-based digital healthcare performance • Healthcare providers should be mindful about the country's cultural context that affect dynamic capabilities and ability to adopt value-based digital healthcare performance Global lockdowns due to COVID-19 pandemic prompted healthcare providers to accelerate the utilisation of digital technologies in healthcare services, yet despite this push, the pace of deploying digital healthcare services is still unsatisfactory. While researchers in the field have mainly focused on the role of technology, the role of a country's cultural dimensions as antecedents of dynamic capabilities responsible for driving the digitalisation of the healthcare services is largely under-researched. Consequently, we aim to investigate the role of country's cultural dimensions and dynamic capabilities in the value-based performance of digital healthcare services. The study rests on multiple-case-study design, which was applied to examine the interlinkages between the cultural dimensions, dynamic capabilities and the value-based performance of digital healthcare services across Lithuania, the United States and Spain. Information was gathered through conducting 66 interviews with healthcare ecosystem stakeholders. The study results show that the low-scoring cultural dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation and high-scoring dimensions of individualism, masculinity and indulgence are antecedents of strong dynamic capabilities, specifically with regards to strong environment scanning, employee engagement and organisational learning. Furthermore, strong dynamic capabilities were found to be associated with a more advanced implementation of digital healthcare services.

Application of Machine Learning Models for Predictions on Cross-Border Merger and Acquisition Decisions with ESG Characteristics from an Ecosystem and Sustainable Development Perspective

From an ecosystem perspective, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are one of the key paths for firms to foster complementary sectors and gain complementary assets. From the perspective of sustainable development, M&A can reallocate resources from target to asset to achieve better synergy and prolong the operation of a merged firm. However, M&A activities are characterized by high risk due to the high cost and uncertainty. Thus, a prediction model of M&A decisions is valuable for firms’ strategy design from an ecosystem and sustainable development perspective. By adopting a machine learning technique, this study measured the cross-border M&A decisions by analyzing firm-level cross-sectional data of the global financial marketplace under ecosystem mapping for the application of various country, deal and firm-level indicators related to sustainable development. Our paper can support the hypotheses of corporate governance, ecosystem stakeholder theory, ecosystem risk and institution theory in explaining that firms can increase their success rate of M&A to achieve sustainable development. Methodologically, we used AdaBoost to train several weak classifiers (decision trees) to achieve a strong decision-making model with a large financial transaction database of 215,160 deal activities. Results achieved 80.1% prediction accuracy by using the AdaBoost model through 10-fold cross validation. We found that differences exist on prediction features of M&A with different characteristics of sustainable development. For a robustness check, comparable results were obtained with a support vector machine (SVM) model. By analyses of the features during the cross-border M&A decision-making processing, this study is expected to contribute to the utilization of machine learning in ecosystem studies.

Marginal Voices, Resilient Acts: Urban Marginality and Responses to Climate-Related Events in Lilongwe City Informal Settlements

Urban informal settlements have, over the years, been centres of conflicting development debates, yet, for people with low socio-economic status, these are areas of opportunities. However, the “peripheral” nature of these locations has far-reaching implications on how people in these areas participate in decision-making processes that affect them. Lately, the effects of climate-related events have also added another layer of socio-economic, political, and environmental challenge to the dynamics of life in the marginal areas of the urban setting. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine how people in marginal informal settlements of Lilongwe City respond to climate-related events and interact with the wider ecosystem of development stakeholders. The major thesis of the paper is that while critical policymakers ignore these peripheral voices in the provision of basic services, an enhanced support to these informal settlements can prove positive if efforts are harnessed to mitigate the effects of climate-related events and urban marginality and amplify marginal voices to change social policies for the good of all. This paper uses the case of Lilongwe City where three informal settlements of Mtandire, Kaliyeka, and Kawale form part of the study.

Drivers and barriers for secure hardware adoption across ecosystem stakeholders

Abstract The decisions involved in choosing technology components for systems are poorly understood. This is especially so where the choices pertain to system security and countering the threat of cybersecurity attack. Although common in some commercial products, secure hardware chips provide security functions such as authentication, secure execution and integrity validation on system start, and are increasingly deemed to have a role in devices across sectors, such as IoT devices, autonomous vehicle systems and critical infrastructure components. To understand the decisions and opinions regarding the adoption of secure hardware, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with senior decision-makers from companies spanning a range of sectors, sizes and supply-chain roles. Our results consider the business propositional drivers, barriers and economic factors that influence the adoption decisions. Understanding these would help those seeking to influence the adoption process, whether as a business decision, or as a trade or national strategy.

Impact of social media analytics on digital innovation

This paper explores the creation of value with the interactions of consumer and expert stakeholders in digital innovation ecosystems. We look at this by using the methodological strategy of social media Analytics that is an interdisciplinary approach which seeks to combine, expand and adapt techniques for analyzing social networking information. By utilizing the SMA framework to observe user generated contents posted on social networking platforms, we evaluate just how consumer and expert stakeholders associate value to Spotify, a new entrant in the Swedish publishing business which offers digital subscription service for streaming audiobooks. Drawing out of a dataset of 2,633 user generated contents, our findings illustrate the value creating methods where stakeholders within Spotify's ecosystems associate value to Spotify's digital innovation. The findings of ours more highlight which the value creating methods arising out of the interactions of consumer and expert stakeholders in social networking give rise to the hybridization of value, in which several types of value groups merge in the studied situation. This analysis contributes to extant literature on management of innovation and info systems by shedding light on the way great is produced by evaluating value creating methods as an outcome of the interactions between stakeholders and checking out the ensuing merging of value groups inside digital innovation ecosystems and hence exploring the hybridization of worth.