Self-Sovereign Identity Ecosystems : Benefits and Challenges

Verifiable credentials, coupled with decentralized ledger technologies, have been potential providers of trustworthy digital identity for individuals, organizations, and other entities, and thus, potential enablers of trustful digital interactions. The rapid development of this technology—called self-sovereign identity (SSI)—and the ecosystems built around it have been fostered even more by the societal needs stemming from the current pandemic crisis, when governments, non-profit organizations, businesses, and individuals are working together on different aspects of SSI to enable mainstream adoption. In this study, we build on rich qualitative data gathered from SSI practitioners to give a …

ICO Crowdfunding: Incentives, Pricing Strategy, Token Strategy and Crowd Involvement

AbstractBlockchain technologies provide means to develop services that are secure, transparent and efficient by nature. Unsurprisingly, the emerging business opportunities has gained a lot of interest that is realized in form of successful Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that are able to raise billions of USD through crowdfunding campaign. In this exploratory research we study 91 ICOs through content analysis in order to investigate the special characteristics of ICO crowdfunding as business models towards the possible investors. We found that ICOs can be described through (1) the model for providing incentives for investment, (2) the pricing strategy, (3) the token strategy and (4) the activ…

Cost benefits of flexible hybrid cloud storage : Mitigating volume variation with shorter acquisition cycle

The hybrid cloud storage is investigated as a case of concurrent sourcing.The paper introduces an analytical model for hybrid cloud storage costs.We study the role of acquisition cycle and volume variation in hybrid cloud costs.Shortening the reassessment interval reduces the volume non-stationarity.Shortening the reassessment interval reduces the total hybrid costs. Hybrid cloud storage combines cost-effective but inflexible private storage along with flexible but premium-priced public cloud storage. As a form of concurrent sourcing, it offers flexibility and cost benefits to organizations by allowing them to operate at a cost-optimal scale and scope under demand volume uncertainty. Howeve…

The State of Self-Sovereign Identity in Spring 2021: Results of a Survey

A System-based View of Blockchain Governance

Abstract CONTEXT Governance is crucial in achieving the success and sustainability of blockchain systems. However, blockchain governance is multi-faceted, complex, dynamic, and challenging due to its decentralized nature and automatically enforced rules and mechanisms. OBJECTIVES This study aims to advance the theory of blockchain governance and support practitioners to deepen the researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of blockchain governance. METHODS The study is a systematic literature review of 75 articles that applies systems theory to conceptualize blockchain governance as a system and parsimoniously organize its interrelated elements into a conceptual model. RESULTS The paper …

Using Blockchain in Digitalizing Enterprise Legacy Systems: An Experience Report

Blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT) offer a secure, distributed, and tamper-proof way to store and exchange information. However, apart from standard cryptocurrency-based networks, innovations and process improvements based on the blockchain technology have mostly remained on the conceptualizing stage and have not yet reached mass adoption. There is a high demand for practical experiences from developing blockchain and DLT based systems in various domains outside FinTech. This work seeks to contribute to this gap by presenting real-world experiences from developing a proof of concept for automatizing conditional payments in social benefits and healthcare domains. W…

SaaS architecture and pricing models

In the new era of computing, SaaS software with different architectural characteristics might be priced in different ways. Even though both pricing and architectural characteristics are responsible for the success of the offering; the relationship between architectural and pricing characteristics has not been studied before. The present study fills this gap by employing a multi-case research. The findings accentuate that flexible and well-designed architecture enables different pricing models; however, poorly designed architecture limits also the pricing. Scalability and high level of modularity are the major enablers of a great variety of pricing models. Using public cloud services may lea…

Towards a Trustful Digital World : Exploring Self-Sovereign Identity Ecosystems

In the current global situation-burdened by, among others, a vast number of people without formal identification, digital leap, the need for health passports and contact tracking applications-providing private and secure digital identity for individuals, organizations and other entities is crucial. The emerging self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions rely on distributed ledger technologies and verifiable credentials and have the potential to enable trustful digital interactions. In this human-centric paradigm, trust among actors can be established in a decentralized manner while the identity holders are able to own and control their confidential data. In this paper, we build on observations…

Role of Acquisition Intervals in Private and Public Cloud Storage Costs

The volume of worldwide digital content has increased nine-fold within the last five years, and this immense growth is predicted to continue in the foreseeable future to reach 8 ZB by 2015. Traditionally, organizations proactively have built and managed their private storage facilities to cope with the growing demand for storage capacity. Recently, many organizations have instead welcomed the alternative of outsourcing their storage needs to the providers of public cloud storage services due to the proliferation of public cloud infrastructure offerings. The comparative cost-efficiency of these two alternatives depends on a number of factors, such as the prices of the public and private stor…

Pricing of Digital Innovations as an Entrepreneurial Process

How do entrepreneurs set a price for digital innovations they develop and market? This is an important question in current information society where digitalization is making established pricing models outdated. In this study, we focus on this issue by examining what kinds of activities and resources entrepreneurs possess when pricing digital innovations. Based on five case studies, including 37 interviews with key decision makers involved in the pricing process, we found that pricing of digital innovations can be conceptualized as an entrepreneurial process in which the pricing capabilities are developed based on the resources at hand. In this view, the pricing model is adjusted through neg…

Financial aspects of business models : reducing costs and increasing revenues in a cloud context

The emergence of cloud computing induces opportunities for software vendors and for organizations with great storage needs. Indeed, software companies have begun to adopt cloud technologies and offer their software as a service to customers instead of selling software products. As a result, their revenue models have changed, and the diversity and complexity of the resulting pricing models have created both opportunities and impediments to competition in the market. On the other hand, due to the exponentially growing volume of digital content, organizations have an increasing demand for storage and need to choose between private, public, and hybrid storage solutions. This decision requires c…

Pricing of digital goods and services

Paper presented at 41st Information Systems Research Conference in Scandinavia (IRIS), Odense, Denmark. peerReviewed

Cost Efficiency of Hybrid Cloud Storage : Shortening Acquisition Cycle to Mitigate Volume Variation

Hybrid cloud storage infrastructure, which combines cost-effective but inflexible private resources and flexible but premium-priced public cloud storage, allows organizations to operate cost-efficiently under demand volume uncertainty. The extant literature, however, offers a limited analytical insight into the effect that the variation of demand has on the cost-efficient mix of internal and external resources. This paper considers the storage capacity acquisition cycle, i.e. the interval at which the organization re-assesses and acquires additional resources, as a parameter shaping the optimal mix of resources. It introduces a model capturing the compound effect of the acquisition cycle an…

Cloud Services Pricing Models

A major condition for commercial success is a well-defined pricing strategy, however, cloud service providers face many challenges around pricing. Clearness and transparency in pricing is beneficial for all the actors in the ecosystem, where the currently existing abundance of different pricing models makes decision making difficult for service providers, partners, customers and competitors. In this paper, the SBIFT pricing model is evaluated and updated to cloud context. As a result, a 7-dimensional cloud pricing framework is proposed that helps clarifying the possible pricing models in order to let companies differentiate themselves from competitors by price. The framework can be used als…

Impact of Cloud Computing Technologies on Pricing Models of Software Firms – Insights from Finland

In this paper we study the changes in the pricing models of software firms that use cloud computing technologies as part of their products and services. This paper presents findings from 324 responses to a questionnaire survey on how pricing model elements of software firms have changed as a result of adopting hardware virtualization, multi-tenancy, online delivery and configurability. The findings suggest that Software-as-a-Service firms – making use of the cloud computing technologies – are generally simplifying their pricing model, increasing the use of usage-based pricing, reducing the customers’ influence and unifying their pricing across customers. These changes occur together with st…

Pricing of digital services as an effectual co-creative process

Entrepreneurs have to price their innovations under the unpredictability of customers’ reactions. While predictive pricing methods are prevalent in business-to-business pricing literature, we argue for the critical importance of control-oriented pricing strategies for digital services. By applying effectuation theory, our study investigates how entrepreneurs co-create their pricing strategies for their digital services as a co-evolutionary, iterative process with their customers. We found that pricing is the co-evolutionary process where entrepreneurs learn from their interactions with customers and use this knowledge to develop and improve their pricing practices further. The findings cont…

The pricing capability lifecycle of digital innovations

The pricing capability provides a basis for firms’ competitive advantage. However, to date, the literature has not investigated how this capability forms, develops, and matures. In this study, we define the pricing capability as a dynamic capability consisting of three operational building blocks (tools and data, human and relational resources, and processes, routines, and mechanisms) as well as two dynamic capability building blocks (alertness and responsiveness, and value-based strategic thinking). Furthermore, we propose the pricing capability lifecycle of digital innovations that incorporates insights of the dynamic capabilities view (DCV). Based on a longitudinal multi-case study of fi…

How modeling helps in developing self-sovereign identity governance framework: An experience report

Digital Identity has become a topic that attracts the attention of researchers due to the enormous number of services that have been provided online recently. Researchers face many obstacles regarding the security, privacy, and utility of digital identity. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) ecosystems provide a solution for digital identity, in addition to providing a decentralized human-centric paradigm that enables users to own and control their identity. Governance framework (GF) is a key challenge in building SSI ecosystems for two reasons. First, the GF needs to address various aspects such as user needs, standards, laws, and business requirements in an ecosystem. Second, the ecosystem cons…

What Key Aspects Do ICOs Reveal About Their Businesses?

AbstractBlockchain technologies disrupt industries by enabling decentralized and transactional data sharing across a network of untrusted participants, among others. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are a novel form of crowdfunding through which hundreds of blockchain-enabled businesses manage to raise billions of dollars in total only in United States. However, there is a lack of understanding of the ICO phenomenon especially related to the business aspects. In this paper, we describe the results of an exploratory study of 91 ICOs and identify the key business model elements that ICOs reveal in their websites and whitepapers. Furthermore, we also note the immaturity and lack of transparency o…

Blockchain Governance : A Dynamic View

The governance of blockchain systems is unique due to its decentralized nature and automatically enforced rules and mechanisms. Moreover, blockchain governance is crucial in achieving success and sustainability. With this study, we aim to advance the theory of blockchain governance and support practitioners by defining blockchain governance from a holistic viewpoint and identifying its building blocks. As a result of a systematic literature review of 75 recent articles focusing on blockchain governance, we propose a dynamic model that deepens the researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of blockchain governance. The conceptual model can serve as a reference framework and structured fou…