Newspapers’ digital transformation offers various opportunities and challenges for publishers. While some publishers, such as The New York Times, have been able to monetize their online content, many publishers struggle to sustain revenues. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, we propose that a coopetitive news platform co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news could resolve this problem. However, we lack theoretically grounded design knowledge for designing such a coopetitive news platform. We conducted a 5-year echeloned design science research (eDSR) project to address this gap. Through 16 design echelons, we developed a news platform prototype and produced design knowledge for developing it. Our findings offer proof of concept and proof of value for the proposed artefact from users’ and online news publishers’ perspectives. Our contributions to the literature and practice are several. We developed design principles and abductively built a mid-range design theory for designing coopetitive news platforms that loosely couple platform proxies, enabling them to form a coopetition alliance. This, in turn, creates novel opportunities for bundling and cross-selling content from various competing publishers via novel coopetitive subscription plans.

This study uses a design science research methodology to develop and evaluate the Pi-Mind agent, an information technology artefact that acts as a responsible, resilient, ubiquitous cognitive clone – or a digital copy – and an autonomous representative of a human decision-maker. Pi-Mind agents can learn the decision-making capabilities of their “donors” in a specific training environment based on generative adversarial networks. A trained clone can be used by a decision-maker as an additional resource for one’s own cognitive enhancement, as an autonomous representative, or even as a replacement when appropriate. The assumption regarding this approach is as follows: when someone was forced to leave a critical process because of, for example, sickness, or wanted to take care of several simultaneously running processes, then they would be more confident knowing that their autonomous digital representatives were as capable and predictable as their exact personal “copy”. The Pi-Mind agent was evaluated in a Ukrainian higher education environment and a military logistics laboratory. In this paper, in addition to describing the artefact, its expected utility, and its design process within different contexts, we include the corresponding proof of concept, proof of value, and proof of use.

The paper develops a conceptual framework to study the constructs of information technology (IT)-supported value co-creation and co-destruction through shared processes of social interaction and resource integration as mediated by IT and embedded in interactive value formation practices. In particular, the elements of social interaction and resource integration are identified, and the role of IT is discussed. We conduct a systematic literature review and analyze the data using the service system perspective. Our research contributes by identifying the constructs of value-creating phenomena enabled by IT from the service system perspective and presenting a research agenda for further studies.

This paper reports a design science research (DSR) study that develops, demonstrates and evaluates a set of design principles for information systems (IS) that utilise learning analytics to support learning and teaching in higher education. The initial set of design principles is created from theory-inspired conceptualisation based on the literature, and they are evaluated and revised through a DSR process of demonstration and evaluation. We evaluated the developed artefact in four courses with a total enrolment of 1,173 students. The developed design principles for learning analytics information systems (LAIS) to establish a foundation for further development and implementation of learning analytics to support learning and teaching in higher education.

We propose the definition of genres in IS design science research (DSR). In recent years DSR has become a well-accepted research paradigm within IS; however, now the diversity of purpose, methodology, and mental models has increased to a point where reviewers and editors are unsure about which standards to apply to particular research submissions. For some researchers an artefact of value is a system or system component, while for others artefacts ought to be theories or theory components. Such differences are hard to reconcile and researchers often face criticism from diverse corners of the paradigm, where beliefs and standards are very different. We observed this diversity of views among authors, editors, and reviewers while editing this special issue. The problem continues to the current day. A solution may lie in defining genres of IS DSR, each with its model for DSR processes and outcomes. We define five prototype genres, based on selected articles, along with their typical characteristics, standards, and values. Several articles in this special issue typify various potential genres. The recognition of mutually respectful DSR genres may improve researchers' ability to publish in the highest tier IS journals, as colleagues, reviewers, and editors recognize and respect genre differences.

We use social science theories, design science research methodology, and our experience in five development projects to design principles for selecting or adapting requirements acquisition (RA) techniques for use with populations of customers and users. The information systems (IS) literature has not systematically focused on the adaption of RA techniques to particular populations. We developed a nascent design theory for RA to target specific populations to define functional requirements for new IS. Five reference theories – personal construct theory, theory of disability, diffusion of innovations, social actor theory, and media richness and information synchronicity theory – support the design. The theory was evaluated iteratively with five client organisations, involving more than 200 participants.

This paper examines how culture affects requirements and their prioritization. We analyze the requirements of a mobile service, which were collected from Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Las Vegas. We argue that the current prioritization techniques for requirements do not sufficiently account for the cultural effects, nor does the literature offer information on ways of prioritizing such requirements according to users’ values. We see this as problematic because the literature suggests that culture should be viewed as a set of values. Our findings support the argument that we should use a value-based approach in prioritizing requirements. Furthermore, by focusing on the links between needs and values, we should be able to develop prioritization techniques not only for multicultural settings but also for information systems (IS) development projects that involve subcultures, such as adolescent users or members of specific organizations. Our findings show that this can be a powerful way of understanding the differences between various subcultures of IS users. In addition, we demonstrate how the laddering interviewing technique can be used to support this work. The proposed value-based requirements prioritization approach is also ready for industry applications and it is agnostic to the underlying IS development method used by developers.

This article explores extreme programming (XP) as an information systems development approach and argues that it is mainly old wine in new bottles. We take an interpretive and critical view of the phenomenon. We made an empirical study of two companies that apply an XP-style development approach throughout the information systems development life cycle. The results of our research suggest that XP is a combination of best practices of traditional information systems development methods. It is hindered by its reliance on talented individuals, which makes its large-scale deployment as a general-purpose method difficult. We claim that XP can be useful for small teams of domain experts who are physically close together and able to communicate well with the end users, and who are good designers and implementers. However, these skilled and motivated individuals with high working moral can exhibit high productivity regardless of the methods used if they are not overly constrained by bureaucracy.