My new Springer essential on marketing in the digital age is set to come out this summer, most likely in August. Stay tuned for further information.

Our paper "Investigating the Co-Creation of IT Consulting Service Value: Empirical Findings of a Matched Pair Analysis" co-authored by Severin Oesterle, Arne Buchwald and me has been accepted for publication in Electronic Markets.

Abstract
Digitalization is increasingly and broadly impacting on companies throughout all industries. To cope with digital transformation, organizations need specific IT skills and often face a bottleneck between required and existing capabilities. Thus, organizations revert to support from IT consultants. However, such collaborations need to create value so as to make client organizations future-proof in the long term. We therefore need a better understanding of how value is created in IT consulting projects. We build on service-dominant (S-D) logic as the theory base and evaluate our structural model, which explains IT consulting service value based on 77 matched pairs of IT consulting projects using structural equation modeling. We provide empirical support for the assumptions of S-D logic in the IT consulting industry and reveal determinants that significantly contribute to the overall IT consulting service value. Our results contribute to the ongoing discourse in the S-D logic literature and provide meaningful insights for practice.

Our article "KI-Anwendungsfälle zielgerichtet identifizieren" co-authored by Peter Hofmann, Jan Jöhnk, Dominik Protschky, Philipp Stähle, Christoph Buck and me has been published in Wirtschaftsinformatik & Management. The article can be downloaded here.

Three papers from our Fraunhofer Blockchain Lab have been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management:

• Schweizer, A., Knoll, P., Urbach, N., von der Gracht, H. and Hardjono, T. (2020) To what extent will blockchain drive the machine economy? Perspectives from a prospective study, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, forthcoming. (Link)
• Lockl, J., Schlatt, V., Schweizer, A., Urbach, N. and Harth, N. (2020) Toward Trust in Internet of Things (IoT) Ecosystems: Design Principles for Blockchain-based IoT Applications, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, forthcoming. (Link)
• Guggenberger, T., Schweizer, A. and Urbach, N. (2020) Improving Inter-Organizational Information Sharing for Vendor Managed Inventory: Towards a Decentralized Information Hub Using Blockchain Technology, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, forthcoming. (Link)
  

Today, I participated in an online panel entitled "software eats the world" as part of the 82nd Annual Business Researcher Conference in Frankfurt. Together with colleagues from academia and experts from practice, we discussed the question to what extent companies in the digital age develop towards software businesses.

The second edition of the Springer book "Digitalization Cases" is designed to present a rich compilation of real-world cases on digitalization. More specifically, with all economic and societal sectors being challenged by emergent digital technologies, this book aims to illustrate how organizations all around the globe leverage their capabilities to foster digital innovation, to develop digital business models, and to digitally transform themselves.

In doing so, this book reports on best practices and lessons learned from organizations that succeeded in tackling challenges and seizing opportunities presented by the digital era. The cases provide insightful examples for practitioners and interesting cases for researchers, teachers, and students globally. All case descriptions follow a common format, making them easily accessible and comparable for the reader. Moreover, accompanying case materials facilitate the learning experience.

Please find the full call for cases at our website.

I talked with Dr. Silvia Knittel from PricewaterhouseCoopers about managing cyber risks in banks and insurance companies. Please find the podcast interview (in German) here.

As part of an interview series on blockchain and its potential impact in general and the financial industry in particular, I shared my experience and point of view in an interview with Horváth & Partners Management Consultants (in German).