KD²Lab Seminarraum

Applying Echeloned Design Science Methodology in Practice – The Case of Developing Design Principles for a Coopetitive News Platform

Abstract:
This talk will offer an in-depth view of a echeloned design science research project with sixteen design echelons and how the project evolved during a five year study. Our study context online newspaper platforms and the challenges related to churn rates of digital news subscriptions and monetizing news content. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, we propose that a coopetitive news platform co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news could resolve this problem. However, we lack theoretically grounded design knowledge for designing such a coopetitive news platform. We conducted a five-year echeloned design science research (eDSR) project to address this gap. Through 16 design echelons, we developed a news platform prototype and produced design knowledge for developing it. Our findings offer proof of concept and proof of value for the proposed artefact from users’ and online news publishers’ perspectives. Our contributions to the literature and practice are several. The developed design principles offer a conceptual foundation for designing a coopetitive digital platform with a simplified onboarding process for new paying subscribers that loosely couples platform proxies, enabling them to form a coopetition alliance. This, in turn, creates novel opportunities for bundling and cross-selling content from various coopeting publishers via novel subscription and pricing plans for digital subscriptions using micropayments.

Tuure Tuunanen | University of Jyväskylä

Bio: Tuure Tuunanen is a Professor of Information Systems in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä. He leads the Value Creation for Cyber-Physical Systems and Services Research Group and Finnish Hub for Digitalization. He is also a global faculty fellow of the Center for Service Leadership at Arizona State University and House of Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics. He holds M.Sc. and D.Sc. (Econ.) degrees from the Aalto University School of Business. Dr. Tuunanen’s research is at the cross-sections of information systems, software engineering, marketing, and service research, and he is keenly interested in multi-disciplinary research in digital service innovation, design, and development.  His prior research has focused on requirements engineering, information systems development, and risk management. He also does research on design science research methodologies and theory development. His current research interests lie in the area of digital and cyber-physical services. He is an associate editor for Communication of the Association for Information Systems (department of digital design) and Journal of Service Research and a senior editor for European Journal of Information Systems and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He is also an editorial board member of Information Systems Research. Tuure has also published a cookbook, “Food Happy People – Menus for Entertaining,” with his family. The cookbook is a comprehensive guide to entertaining. It is a collection of 43 complete menus – typically a starter, a main dish, and a dessert – together with suggestions for wine pairings. While you can certainly mix and match dishes across menus, each menu has been carefully planned with consideration to progression and season. You can order the cookbook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1J1XKHV (or, e.g., at the Amazon Deutschland).