Data ecosystems are a novel inter-organizational form of cooperation. They require at least one data provider and one or more data consumers. Existing research mainly addresses generativity mechanisms in this relationship, such as business models or role models for data ecosystems. However, an essential prerequisite for thriving data ecosystems is high data quality in the shared data. Without sufficient data quality, sharing data might lead to negative business consequences, given that the information drawn from them or services built on them might be incorrect or produce fraudulent results. We tackle this issue precisely since we report on a multi-case study deploying data quality tools in data ecosystem scenarios. From these cases, we derive generalized prescriptive design knowledge as a design theory to make the knowledge available for others designing data quality tools for data sharing. Subsequently, our study contributes to integrating the issue of data quality in data ecosystem research and provides practitioners with actionable guidelines inferred from three real-world cases.

Sharing data is highly potent in assisting companies in internal optimization and designing new products and services. While the benefits seem obvious, sharing data is accompanied by a spectrum of concerns ranging from fears of sharing something of value, unawareness of what will happen to the data, or simply a lack of understanding of the short- and mid-term benefits. The article analyzes data sharing in inter-organizational relationships by examining 13 cases in a qualitative interview study and through public data analysis. Given the importance of inter-organizational data sharing as indicated by large research initiatives such as Gaia-X and Catena-X, we explore issues arising in this process and formulate research challenges. We use the theoretical lens of Actor-Network Theory to analyze our data and entangle its constructs with concepts in data sharing.

In times of rapid and unpredictable developments, companies experience significant volatility in capacity utilization. Virtual capacity exchange platforms help to mitigate this challenge by exchanging capacities with anonymous participants in market-like peer-to-peer networks. However, its efficiency is hindered by behavioral uncertainties, including a lack of inter-organizational trust in other participants. To leverage the potential of such exchange platforms, this paper reports on a Design Science Research project aiming to derive and validate design principles for establishing trust in inter-organizational capacity exchange in two design iterations. Using blockchain technology, we instantiate six design principles into an artifact and perform experimental evaluations to investigate their effect on perceived trust. Our paper contributes to research and practice by identifying and applying prescriptive design knowledge and advancing our understanding of how to design trust-enabling inter-organizational systems. The originality lies within the empirical investigation of how and why different design principle combinations can be established through blockchain technology as one of the promising approaches for establishing trust. In doing this, we also disclose future pathways for IS and blockchain researchers and practitioners.

Digital platforms disrupt established industries and their current competitive dynamics. Interestingly, only a few very successful digital platforms achieve this transformation impact, as more than 80% of platforms fail. One of the main reasons for platform failure is overlooked competition. To support practitioners in designing a digital platform offering a competitive and compelling value proposition, we propose a multi-perspective approach. The multi-perspectives are integrated into a multi-step refinement process aiming at platform success: It analyzes the most common failure factors and selects corresponding detailed analyses integrating established frameworks and methods before deriving the value proposition design. To guide practitioners in adopting the multi-perspective approach, we propose its integration into the GOLD tool. This IT -based tool allows for transparency, hierarchization, dependencies, and interlinkages between the different perspectives toward a more holistic understanding and platform design.