Welcome to the 11/12 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. This issue consists of a mixture of themes structured under our usual “Insights” title.

The issue starts with Petra Kugler and Thomas Plank’s article, “Coping with the Double-Edged Sword of Data Sharing in Ecosystems”. In an investigation of the changing rules of business due to the emergence of digital technology and artificial intelligence, they introduce a data sharing strategy framework based on a literature review of texts about data analytics.  The framework aims to help companies decide the kinds of data to share in a digital ecosystem, as well as what should be kept private to help companies maintain their comparative advantage. The paper explores the rules and regulations required for dealing with various types of operative, strategic and monetizable data. The intended audience includes both practitioners and scientists, who may benefit from the data framework to mitigate the risks of losing competitive advantage in digital ecosystems, or to improve usage of theoretical concepts related to data such as capabilities and resources.

The second paper by Virender Kumar, Amrendra Pandey, and Rahul Singh involves practitioner perspectives in asking, “Can Artificial Intelligence be a Critical Success Factor of Construction Projects?” To answer the title’s research question, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews and analyzed the response content. The interviewees include experienced project managers from the global community with expertise in project management working on large construction projects. Results of the research include a distinction highlighted by senior project managers in perceiving artificial intelligence (AI) as different from information technology and advanced project management software. Some of the drawbacks of AI were identified as its lack of soft skills, having interpretive intelligence unlike human beings, and weak human relationship capabilities to address the ways people manage projects.

In the third paper, Mika Westerlund, Ishdeep Singh, Mervi Rajahonka, and Seppo Leminen explore “Technology Project Summaries as a Predictor of Crowdfunding Success”. This paper looks at the recent emergence of crowdfunding as a way for technology entrepreneurs to raise funds for projects, products, and business ideas. Through an analysis of Kickstarter fundraising campaigns, the authors seek to predict what distinguishes projects that reach their fundraising goals from those that fail to do so. With the help of topic modelling on a data set of over 21,000 Kickstarter technology projects, they investigate if short-text project summaries may provide insights to help predict fundraising success or failure on crowdfunding platforms. Their results show that the displayed summaries of technology projects that successfully raise funds from backers use more trendy topics, offer wording that clearly reflects their novelty, and focus on solving a social problem.

The next paper by Inka Lappalainen and Maija Federley is titled “The Role of Digital Platforms in Resident-Centric Housing Concepts”. The authors investigate the designs, as well as value creation and capture of platform ecosystems in housing markets using service-dominant logic. They focus on four holistic pilot housing ecosystems in Finland that are designed to combine the physical environment of residents with a digital platform. The novelty of this study builds on a holistic understanding of value co-creation in housing, enabled by digital platforms at the ecosystem level. The paper concludes that digital platforms can enable new value creation opportunities in resident-centric housing concepts through a novel “housing as a service” platform approach. The audience is intended as both practitioners and researchers who are exploring opportunities of platform economies.

In the fifth paper, Shweta Shirolkar and Kanchan Patil present “Antecedents, Decisions, and Outcomes of a Sharing Economy”, following a systematic literature review. Their analysis covers research and papers published between 2008 and 2020, involving both developed and emerging countries. The literature review includes 93 articles gathered with an aim to understand emerging consumer behavior that involves collaborative consumption aided by technological innovation. The authors show that the impacts of sharing economies (SEs) on incumbents have increased competition between traditional market players due to the emergence of new platforms with sharing-oriented business model innovation. The research findings indicate that various value categories, including social value, hedonic value, economic value, environmental value, and entrepreneurial opportunity serve as major antecedents to participate in SEs.

For future issues, we invite general submissions of articles on technology entrepreneurship, innovation management, and other topics relevant to launching and scaling technology companies, and for solving practical business problems in emerging domains such as artificial intelligence and blockchain applications in business. Potential contributors could also consult the TIM Review topic model (https://topicmodeling.timreview.ca/#/model) to examine the dominant publication themes so far, which might help with ideas for valuable future contributions. Please contact us with potential article ideas and submissions, or proposals for special issues.