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With the increasing importance and urgency of climate change, companies are challenged to contribute to sustainable development, especially by younger generations. However, existing corporate contributions have been criticized as insufficient, which could be particularly caused by a lack of employee engagement in corporate sustainability. In this context, gamification has been proposed and increasingly investigated in recent years as a promising, innovative tool to motivate sustainable employee behaviors in the workplace. However, there are few studies and applicable gamification solutions that address more than one specific sustainability issue and thus take a holistic perspective on sustainable behaviors in the workplace. Moreover, previous research lacks a comprehensive understanding of how different gamification elements elicit specific psychological effects, how these manifest in behavioral changes, and how these, in turn, cumulatively result in measurable corporate outcomes. The path from gamification as ”input” to corporate sustainability as ”output” thus remains unexplored.
This dissertation fills this gap by conceptualizing, designing, and evaluating a holistic gamified intervention that supports employees in various sustainable behaviors in their daily activities. The project uses a design science research approach that closely involves employees in the incremental development of the solution. As part of the iterative design process, this dissertation presents six studies to extend the theoretical understanding of gamification for sustainable employee behaviors. First, a comprehensive review of existing research on gamification for sustainable employee behavior is provided, analyzing gamification designs and results of previous studies and outlining an agenda for further research (Study 1). Theoretical foundations of research on gamification, serious games, and game-based learning (Study 2) and empirical design principles for gamification and persuasive systems (Study 3) are then systematically reviewed as a basis for the successful design of gamified applications. Subsequently, empirical studies explore employees’ motivations for sustainable behavior and illuminate their expectations for design features (Study 4), and identify contextual challenges and design dilemmas when implementing gamification in an organizational context (Study 5). Finally, a quantitative field study (Study 6) explores how different gamification designs influence sustainable employee behavior and corporate sustainability in organizations. Based on the findings, this dissertation presents a comprehensive framework of gamification for sustainable employee behavior that incorporates design, individual behavior, and organizational perspectives. Finally, building on these insights, it provides practical recommendations for designing gamification to encourage sustainable employee behavior at work.
While the existing literature on cooperative R&D projects between firms and public research institutes (PRI) has made valuable contributions by examining various factors and their influence on different outcome measures, there has been no investigation of cooperative R&D project success between firms and PRI from a product competitive advantage perspective. However, insights into the development of a meaningful and superior product (i.e., product competitive advantage) are particularly important in the context of cooperative R&D projects between PRI and (mainly small and medium-sized) firms in the biotechnology industry in response to increasing competition to raise capital funds necessary for survival.
The objectives of this thesis are: (1) to elaborate the theoretical foundations which explain the achievement of a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI, (2) to identify and empirically evaluate the determining factors for achieving a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI, and (3) to show how cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI should be designed and executed to support the achievement of a product competitive advantage.
To accomplish these objectives, a model of determinants of product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI is developed by drawing from the theoretical foundations of resource-based theory and information-processing theory. The model is evaluated using data from 517 questionnaires on cooperative R&D projects between at least one biotechnology firm and one PRI. The data are analyzed using variance-based structural equation modeling (i.e., PLS-SEM) in order to conduct hypotheses testing. The evaluation of the empirical data includes an additional mediation analysis and the comparison of effects in subsamples.
The results demonstrate the importance of available resources and skills, as well as the proficient execution of marketing-related and technical activities for the achievement of a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI. By identifying project-related and process-related factors affecting product competitive advantage and empirically testing their relationships, the research findings should be valuable for both researchers and practitioners. After discussing contributions and implications for research and practice, the present thesis concludes with limitations and avenues for future research.
Social entrepreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship that marries a social mission to a competitive value proposition. Notably, social entrepreneurship fosters a more equitable society by addressing social issues and trying to achieve an ongoing sustainable impact through a social mission rather than purely profit maximization. The topic of social entrepreneurship has appealed considerably to many different streams of research. The focus on understanding how and why entrepreneurs think and act is a significant justification for future research. Nevertheless, the theoretical examination of this phenomenon is in its infancy. Social entrepreneurship research is still largely phenomenon-driven. Specifically, Social Entrepreneurial Intention is in an early stage and lacks quantitative research. Therefore, this thesis proposes to address this need. The thesis’ objectives are twofold: (1) develop a formation model for Social Entrepreneurial Intentions in general and (2) test the model by conducting an empirical study. Based on these objectives, the two research questions guiding the thesis are (1) what factors influence the intention of a person to become a social entrepreneur and (2) what relationships exist among these factors.
In order to answer these two research questions, this thesis uses purposeful research design, which is a combination of literature review and empirical study. The literature review is based on a comprehensive range of books, articles, and research papers published in leading academic journals and conference proceedings in different disciplines such as entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, management, social psychology, and social economics. The empirical study is conducted via a survey of 600 last-year students from four universities in three regions in Vietnam: Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh. The data are analyzed with SPSS-AMOS version 24, using screening data, scale development, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmation factor analysis. The thesis ascertains that Entrepreneurship Experience/Extra-curricular Activity, Role Model, Social Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy, and Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation directly and positively affect the intention of the Vietnamese students to be social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship Education also influences the Social Entrepreneurial Intention, but not directly, otherwise indirectly via Social Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy and Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation. Similarly, Perceived Support has no direct relationship to Social Entrepreneurial Intention; however, it shows an indirect link via the mediator ‘Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation’. Furthermore, the dissertation brings new insights to the social entrepreneurship literature and provides important implications for practice. Limitations and future directions are also provided in the thesis.
Die Entstehung von Gründungsteams wird bisher lediglich als Abfolge von Suche, Auswahl und Gewinnung von Gründerpersonen verstanden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird auf Basis von 47 interviewten Gründerpersonen ein neues Verständnis für die Entstehung von Gründungsteams geschaffen. Dabei wird im Stil der Grounded Theory das bisher vorherrschende Model der Teamentstehung maßgeblich erweitert. So wird eine neue Art der Unterscheidung von Grünerpersonen entdeckt, welche auf die Intention von Teammitgliedern abzielt. Zudem zeigt sich, dass Teams in einem iterativ-epiodischen Prozess entstehen und Veränderungen von Teamzu-sammmensetzungen Bestandteil der Entstehung sind. Aufgrund der in dieser Arbeit geschaffenen neuen Erkenntnisse zur Teamentstehung können Handlungsempfehlungen für Gründerpersonen und die Gründungsförderung gegeben werden. Zudem werden neue Untersuchungsgebiete für Gründungsteams eröffnet, die das hier entwickelte Modell als Bezugsrahmen für weitere Forschung nehmen können.
Virtueller Konsum - Warenkörbe, Wägungsschemata und Verbraucherpreisindizes in virtuellen Welten
(2015)
Virtual worlds have been investigated by several academic disciplines for several years, e.g. sociology, psychology, law and education. Since the developers of virtual worlds have implemented aspects like scarcity and needs, even economic research has become interested in these virtual environments. Exploring virtual economies mainly deals with the research of trade regarding the virtual goods used to supply the emerged needs. On the one hand, economics analyzes the meaning of virtual trade according to the overall interpretation of the economical characteristics of virtual worlds. As some virtual worlds allow the change of virtual world money with real money and vice versa, virtual goods are traded by the users for real money, researchers on the other hand, study the impact of the interdependencies between virtual economies and the real world. The presented thesis mainly focuses on the trade within virtual worlds in the context of virtual consumption and the observation of consumer prices. Therefore, the four virtual worlds World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Entropia Universe and Second Life have been selected. There are several components required to calculate consumer price indices. First, a market basket, which contains the relevant consumed goods existing in virtual worlds, must be developed. Second, a weighting scheme has to be established, which shows the dispersion of consumer tendencies. Third, prices of relevant consumer goods have to be taken. Following real world methods, it is the challenge to apply those methods within virtual worlds. Therefore, this dissertation contains three corresponding investigation parts. Within a first analysis, it will be evaluated, in how far virtual worlds can be explored to identify consumable goods. As a next step, the consumption expenditures of the avatars will be examined based on an online survey. At last, prices of consumable goods will be recorded. Finally, it will be possible to calculate consumer price indices. While investigating those components, the thesis focuses not only on the general findings themselves, but also on methodological issues arising, like limited access to relevant data, missing legal legitimation or security concerns of the users. Beside these aspects, the used methods also allow the examination of several other economic aspects like the consumption habits of the avatars. At the end of the thesis, it will be considered to what extent virtual world economic characteristics can be compared with the real world.
Aspects like the important role of weapons or the different usage of food show significant differences to the real world, caused by the business models of virtual worlds.
“Mittelstand” businesses are the backbone of the German economy. To operate effectively, these businesses require sufficient financing provided through adequate financing instruments. Yet, which characteristics do capital seekers value in adequate financing instruments? Despite the macroeconomic relevance of the topic, only few empirical studies exist to this date, which examine the financing behaviour of “Mittelstand”. For the paper at hand, all PREPS financed German businesses were asked to fill out an online survey. PREPS is a standardized mezzanine financing instrument, which was offered to “Mittelstand” businesses with a high degree of credit worthiness - primarily to finance business growth. PREPS financed businesses are of particular interest for this research as they can choose from the greatest variety of financing options amongst their peers due to their size and credit worthiness. Financing instruments differ in terms of rights and obligations associated with them. Depending on their design, financing contracts can fulfil a variety of functions beyond the obvious supply of liquidity, such as financial transformation, influencing of behaviours, and signalling private information. The paper at hand suggests that the businesses in question selected the same financing instrument, however, for different reasons. Furthermore, the degree of appreciation for certain characteristics of the financing instrument varies with business and situation specific context. When exploring individual hypotheses on how individual factors influence this degree of appreciation for certain financing characteristics, this paper builds on core capital structure theories as well as recent empirical insights in regards to financing behaviour. In addition, the paper examines several explorative hypotheses.
The search for scientific literature in scientific information systems is a discipline at the intersection between information retrieval and digital libraries. Recent user studies show two typical weaknesses of the classical IR model: ranking of retrieved and maybe relevant documents and the language problem during the query formulation phase. At the same time traditional retrieval systems that rely primarily on textual document and query features are stagnating for years, as it could be observed in IR evaluation campaigns such as TREC or CLEF. Therefore alternative approaches to surpass these two problem fields are needed. Two different search support systems are presented in this work and evaluated with a lab evaluation using the IR test collection GIRT and iSearch with 150 and 65 topics, respectively. These two systems are (1) a query expansion that is based on the analysis of co-occurrences of document attributes and (2) a ranking mechanism that applies informetric analysis of the productivity of information producers in the information production process. Both systems were compared to a baseline system using the Solr search engine. Both methods showed positive effects when applying additional document attributes like author names, ISSN codes and controlled terms. The query expansion showed an improvement in precision (bpref +12%) and in recall (R +22%).
he alternative ranking methods were able to compete with the baseline for author names and ISSN codes and were able to beat the baseline by using controlled terms (MAP +14%). A clear negative influence was seen when using entities like publishers or locations. Both methods were able to generate a substantially different sorting of the result set, measured using Kendall. So, additional to the improved relevance in the result list, the user can get a new and different view on the document set. Query expansion using author names, ISSN codes and thesaurus terms showed great potential that lies within the rich metadata sets of digital library systems. The proposed ranking methods could outperform standard relevance ranking methods after they were filtered by the existence of a so-called power law. This showed that the proposed ranking methods cannot be used universally in any case but require specific frequency distributions in the metadata. A connection between the underlying informetric laws of Bradford, Lotka and Zipf is made clear. The evaluated methods were implemented as interactive search supporting systems that can be used in an interactive prototype and the social science digital library system Sowiport. Besides that, the methods are adaptable to other systems and environments using a free software framework and a web API.
Despite their importance to the permanent success of service firms, the construct of perceived customer discrimination and its impact on the customer so far has received relatively little attention in business and management research. Existing studies, mostly social science studies from the United States, show the existence of discrimination in different service contexts. Nevertheless, the existing literature shows some gaps that require further research. So far primarily qualitative and case-based studies about customer discrimination exist which hinder the generalization of the findings. Moreover, although such studies give insight into the origin and the perception of discrimination from the customers" perspective, they provide no useful means to the management of service firms to verify the existence of discrimination in the customer contact of their own company. A research gap exists mainly with regard to the measurement of perceived customer discrimination and the investigation of its consequences. The aim of this thesis is to develop and validate a multi-item scale for measuring perceived customer discrimination. Firstly, this thesis develops a literature-based understanding of perceived customer discrimination, assuming a three-dimensional conceptualization of the construct. Based upon this three-dimensional conceptualization in a first study, an instrument for measuring perceived customer discrimination with the dimensions "overt discrimination", "discriminatory level of service" and "subtle discrimination" is being developed using qualitative and quantitative methods. Based on this three-dimensional conceptualization of perceived customer discrimination hypotheses are formulated and empirically tested supporting the nomological validity of the scale (study 1). Subsequently, the predictive validity of the scale is examined with a further sample and a known groups validity is conducted (study 2). To reconfirm the three-dimensionality and the nomological validity of the scale, dyads of service employees and customers are being surveyed in a further study via a questionnaire (study 3). Managerial and research-related implications of the results are discussed.