Generative AI technologies, such as large language models, have the potential to revolutionize much of our higher education teaching and learning. ChatGPT is an impressive, easy-to-use, publicly accessible system demonstrating the power of large language models such as GPT-4. The recent technological developments trigger substantial uncertainty and change in university-level teaching and learning.

Students ask questions like: How can ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools support me? Am I allowed to use ChatGPT for a seminar or final paper, or is that cheating? How exactly do I use ChatGPT best? Are there other ways to access models such as GPT-4? Given that such tools are here to stay, what skills should I acquire, and what is obsolete?

Lecturers ask similar questions from a different perspective: What skills should I teach? How can I test students’ competencies rather than their ability to prompt generative AI models? How can I use ChatGPT and other systems based on generative AI to increase my efficiency or even improve my students’ learning experience and outcomes?

Even if the current discussion revolves around ChatGPT and GPT-4, these are only the forerunners of what we can expect from future generative AI-based models and tools. So even if you think ChatGPT is not yet technically mature, it is worth looking into its impact on higher education.

This is where our recently published whitepaper comes in. It looks at ChatGPT as a contemporary example of a conversational user interface that leverages large language models. The whitepaper looks at ChatGPT from the perspective of students and lecturers. It focuses on everyday areas of higher education: teaching courses, learning for an exam, crafting seminar papers and theses, and assessing students’ learning outcomes and performance. For this purpose, we consider the chances and concrete application possibilities, the limits and risks of ChatGPT, and the underlying large language models.

While most companies are still busy rethinking their identity in a digital world and mastering their digital transformation, the climate crisis is gaining speed. With it, corporate awareness is growing to align themselves more strongly in the direction of sustainability. Many companies already recognize that an immediate sustainability transformation is inevitable to meet the various political, social and economic demands.

Although digitalization and sustainability goals can seem at first glance to be at odds with each other, there is untapped potential in combining digital transformation and sustainability transformation. The trick is to unleash this potential within the framework of a Twin Transformation. The Twin Transformation bundles the transformational forces of digitalization and sustainability at eye level; it pushes corresponding efforts and rewards in the areas of digitalization and sustainability to the same extent. In this context, digitalization serves as a central lever for achieving sustainability goals and, conversely, sustainability as a profound purpose and design framework for the digital transformation.

The Twin Transformation represents an opportunity to master two major and at the same time absolutely necessary challenges and not only to continue as a company in crisis-ridden times, characterized by digital competition, ecological challenges and social tensions, but also to make a positive contribution.

To achieve this successfully and, in the truest sense of the word, sustainably, we would like to provide a guideline with our study. It is intended to help people understand the levers and effects of the Twin Transformation and explains how to use them.

Blockchain-based tokens seek to overcome the friction and opaqueness of the legacy financial infrastructure in the company funding process, particularly in the early-stage and equity crowdfunding domain. While Initial Coin Offerings and Security Token Offerings proposed a solution for crowdfunding, early-stage companies still face challenges in using blockchain as an alternative equity funding infrastructure. In this context, the idea of blockchain-based equity tokens remains hypothetical. In addition, the literature lacks design theory for the development and implementation of blockchain-based equity tokens.

Our research bridges this gap by designing, developing, and evaluating an equity token prototype for crowdfunding, following the design science research approach. We propose a refined crowdfunding model and derive seven design principles that contribute to the design theory of equity tokens. The research results show that blockchain-based equity tokens improve efficiency, transparency, and interoperability while meeting regulatory requirements and facilitating secondary market trading.

Please read more about our research in our latest paper accepted for publication in Electronic Commerce Research.

Last week I had the honor to kick off our lecture series on Blockchain beyond Bitcoin. Together with Simon Feulner, I talked about the foundations and potentials of blockchain and smart contracts. I'm really looking forward to the next talks in this series.

The hype around Artificial Intelligence is gigantic. That's why Peter Hofmann and I have refrained from making sweeping statements about the potential of the associated technologies and applications in our extended editorial focusing on "AI in communication and brand management" in the current 03/2022 issue of transfer - Zeitschrift für Kommunikation und Markenmanagement. On the contrary, with our article we advocate a hype-cleaned and differentiated view of the use of AI applications in market communication and want to clear up myths and false images.

To this end, we provide practical insights into the findings of applied research, which we have gained in numerous projects with companies. After a brief technology introduction, we turn our attention to the application spectrum of AI technologies in market communication and provide readers with a practical structuring framework. Finally, we summarize and answer the question why we should not only talk about AI.

As guest editors of transfer – Zeitschrift für Kommunikation und Markenmanagement (Journal for Communication and Brand Management), Peter Hofmann and I supported and designed the focus on "AI in Communication and Brand Management" in the current issue 03/2022. We wish you a stimulating read: https://transfer-zeitschrift.net/

A couple of days ago, I gave an interview on digital identities (in German), which has now been published in the latest issue of Recht Digital (RDi). Here you find the complete interview.

Last week, I had the pleasure to share my thoughts on the future of IT consulting as part of a keynote talk at the all-hands meeting of it-economics. In my talk, I addressed different facets regarding people and culture as well as future projects and offerings. Furthermore, we had an interesting discussion about the future of software development and the role of AI in a panel format.

Ticket fraud and ticket scalping activities often cause high costs as well as trust concerns for fans buying event tickets, especially in the secondary ticketing market. To address these issues, several publications and projects have proposed using blockchain technology to enable digital trust and ticket verifiability and thus to improve event ticketing systems. However, these approaches exhibit considerable privacy challenges and fall short concerning reliable, efficient visitor identification, which is necessary for controlling secondary market transactions.

We demonstrate how a novel paradigm for end-user digital identity management, called self-sovereign identity (SSI), can be utilized to gain secondary market control. To do so, we follow a rigorous design science research approach to build and evaluate an SSI-based event ticketing framework. Our findings demonstrate that SSI-based event ticketing can enable efficient secondary market control by facilitating a practical implementation of the centralized exchange model. To generalize our results, we derive design principles for the efficient, reliable, and privacy-oriented ticket and identity verification and the use of revocation registries.

Please read more about our research in our latest paper accepted for publication in Electronic Markets.