Meditec is a German manufacturer of instruments for surgeries. The company is quality leader in this sector and supplies many German and international hospitals. However, the opportunities for differentiation against competitors decrease continuously. New competitors from emerging markets are...

As the importance of services in our society increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop these services – commonly termed New Service Development (NSD). An increasing proportion of services are now electronic services delivered over the Internet. The purpose of this...

Service oriented device architecture (SODA) is a promising approach for enabling a continuous IT support of medical processes in hospitals. However, there is a lack of specific design patterns for realizing the concept in an effective and efficient way. This paper addresses this research gap by...

Background: Germany is introducing a nation-wide telemedicine infrastructure that enables electronic health services. The project is facing massive resistance from German physicians, which has led to a delay of more than five years. Little is known about the actual burdens and drivers for...

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the...

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the...

Innovations expressed by customers are often unstructured, unclear, and ambiguous, making it difficult to interpret customers’ contributions, integrate them into a company’s R&D department and transfer them into comprehensible requirements for the development of product, service or software...

Carve-outs belong to the most disruptive events companies – especially IT departments – are subject to. Yet the impact of these events on the IT alignment of the involved business units is largely unknown. This paper utilizes an alignment model to analyze specific IT-related challenges of...

Various studies have proven the positive impact of e-health solutions on treatment success and health care spending. Utilization of e-health is therefore urgently recommended by German health authorities. However, the diffusion of such technologies is currently very low, despite the availability...

The increasing popularity of open innovation approaches has led to the rise of various open innovation communities on the Internet which might contain several thousand user-generated ideas. However, a company's absorptive capacity is limited regarding such an amount of ideas so that there is a...