1,721,111 research outputs found
Crowd science: methods to motivate contributors and firms' benefits
No full textCrowd science: definition, trend and research questions. Activating social strategies: face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science. Bring them aboard: rewarding participation in technology mediated citizen science projects. When does crowdsourcing benefit firm performance 103.Crowd science: definition, trend and research questions. Activating social strategies: face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science. Bring them aboard: rewarding participation in technology mediated citizen science projects. When does crowdsourcing benefit firm performance 103.LUISS PhD Thesi
Founder Education and Start-Up Funds Raised
No full textStart-ups need investor funding to overcome the early stages of their life, during which they are more vulnerable and exposed to failure. They need to convince investors to fund their business ideas by signaling the potential success of their entrepreneurial venture, through a demonstration of cohesion, shared views, and determination. The educational background of the founders of start-ups can be a strong driver of start-up performance, as it is a visible signal for investors. However, education is composed of two different dimensions (i.e., its depth and its heterogeneity), and their configurations should be carefully considered. To clarify this aspect, in this article, we discuss the impact that these two education dimensions have on funds raised by start-ups in the early stages of their life. Results show that highly educated cofounders have improved access to external funding as long as they do not have highly heterogeneous educational backgrounds; in a parallel fashion, cofounders educated in different disciplines also have improved access to funding, as long as they have less advanced levels of education. These findings are relevant to start-up founders and indicate the best team configurations to guarantee better access to capital in the initial stages of their life
Proton exchange membrane fuel cell for cooperating households: A convenient combined heat and power solution for residential applications
No full textIn this paper we compare the technical and economical performances of a high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell with those of an internal combustion engine for a 10 kW combined heat and power residential application. In a view of social innovation, this solution will create new partnerships of cooperating families aiming to reduce the energy consumption and costs.
The energy system is simulated through a lumped model. We compare, in the Italian context, the total daily operating cost and energy savings of each system with respect to the separate purchase of electricity from the grid and production of the thermal energy through a standard boiler. The analysis is carried out with the energy systems operating with both the standard thermal tracking and an optimized management. The latter is retrieved through an optimization methodology based on the graph theory. We show that the internal combustion engine is much more affected by the choice of the operating strategy with respect to the fuel cell, in terms long term profitability. Then we conduct a net present value analysis with the aim of evidencing the convenience of using a high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell for cogeneration in residential applications
Citizen science: involving citizens in research projects and urban planning
No full textStarting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is the expression of a continuous updating of emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility and environment, through a collection of short scientific papers. The Review Notes are made of four parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of TeMA Journal. In particular, the Economy, business and land use section aims at presenting recent advancements on relevant topics that underlie socio-economic relationships between firms and territories. The present note tackles the issue of citizen science, a new data collection methodology for research project that generates sustainability benefits, and that is recently finding applications in urban context to solve social and environmental issues while providing useful information that can be also used to develop urban plans
Open-source intelligence for risk assessment
No full textAdvances in information technology (IT) have prompted tremendous growth in security issues for companies. Increasingly, cyberattacks represent a threat to companies and national security; to prevent them, firms should routinely perform risk assessments of their IT infrastructure and employees. This article highlights the importance of open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools in conducting risk assessments to prevent cyberattacks. More specifically, we performed a vulnerability assessment on the critical infrastructure of a company operating on the U.S. electrical grid. We successfully profiled the company's network software, hardware, and key IT personnelâusing OSINTâand detailed potential vulnerabilities associated with these findings. The results of our study provide empirical evidence for the efficacy of OSINT in improving the security posture of organizations. Our research findings were subsequently used to produce tactical and strategic recommendations for organizations based on the use of OSINT to identify vulnerabilities, mitigate risks, and formulate more robust security policies to prevent cyberattacks
Revealing consumption behaviors in the sharing economy: what leads consumers to replace traditional channels?
No full textPurpose
Advances in information technology and the increasing digitalization of the general public have favored the growth of the sharing economy. The sharing economy is based on transactions of idle resources between individuals to satisfy cogent needs. Notwithstanding the great interest in this emerging phenomenon, it is still not clear which factors are driving the shift in consumer consumption behavior from the traditional economy toward this new economic model. Grounded in self-determination theory, we contend that what is needed is a holistic approach that considers the three elements involved in sharing economy transactions, namely (1) consumer motivations, (2) web-based platforms and (3) types of assets exchanged.
Design/methodology/approach
To conduct our study, we used the Flash Eurobarometer 467 database titled “The Use of the Collaborative Economy,” collected by the European Union with Flash Eurobarometer datasets and openly available to the public. Consequently, our study aims to provide results based on a large-scale quantitative analysis involving a large number of individuals and multiple sectors.
Findings
Our findings provide empirical evidence of the positive effects of the shift in consumption behavior toward the sharing economy brought about by (1) consumers’ intrinsic motivations, (2) the quality of the platform and (3) the human asset-based categories of products offered.
Originality/value
This research seeks to advance understanding of the factors that facilitate the adoption of the sharing economy, and we provide managers and policymakers with suggestions regarding the factors they may leverage to further favor the spread of this economic model
Activating social strategies: Face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science
Full text linkThe use of crowds in research activities by public and private organizations is growing under different forms. Citizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of amateur scientists, citizen science enables distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past few decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, several projects continue to fail due to limited participation. Such web-based projects may isolate the citizen scientists from the researchers. By adopting the perspective of social strategy, we investigate within a measure-manipulate-measure experiment if motivations to participate in a citizen science project can be positively influenced by a face-to-face interaction with the scientists leading the project. Such an interaction provides the participants with the possibility of asking questions on the spot and obtaining a detailed explanation of the citizen science project, its scientific merit, and environmental relevance. Social and cultural factors that moderate the effect brought about by face-to-face interactions on the motivations are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for motivating crowds to participate in online environmental monitoring projects, also offering possible selection criteria of target audience
Interactions with researchers in online citizen science projects
No full textNew forms of grouping used to conduct scientific research in collaboration with people outside the scientific community are growing, known as crowd science. One way to involve the crowd is with citizen science projects, that are researches involving joint efforts between professional researches and citizens in the collection and analyses of data. The benefits brought by this cooperation in citizen science projects are profitable for both researchers and citizens: more hours of work devoted to the project and reduced costs of scientific research; increased literacy and technology knowledge for the citizens; stimulated connections among researches and people; and, finally, an enjoyable experience for the public. The huge amount of data to be collected and analyzed needs a great number of participants helping the professional scientists. Advances in information technology have helped in involving a higher number of people through the web, however the methodologies used to increase motivations to participate are still a crucial issue in citizen science online projects. In this paper, we test the interaction with the professional researchers as a technique to increase citizen scientists’ motivations to contribute. Our explorative findings quantify the motivations increase to participate in citizen science projects brought by this technique and moderated by the effect of age. These results are useful to better manage citizen science projects and could be extended also to other crowd based activities
[Conference version] Effects of face-to-face interaction on motivations to participate in technology-mediated citizen science
No full textCitizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of these amateur scientists, citizen science offers the advantages of distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, continuous recruitment and engagement of participants remains important factors. Such web-based projects may alienate the citizen scientists from the researchers.
In this paper, we investigate how motivations to participate in a citizen science project vary after an on-site, face to face interaction with the scientists leading the project. We use a citizen science-based environmental monitoring project as a case study, and in a measure-manipulate-measure experiment, find that involving users directly in data collection and interaction with the researchers of the project increases overall participant motivation to contribute to the project. Cultural and societal factors that contribute to motivation are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for better motivating contributors and predicting who would be more positively affected to contribute. The subsequent benefits to data collection and analysis for environmental monitoring are immediate. Moreover, the increased scientific literacy of contributors as a result of raised participation, let citizen scientists represent a useful resource to be involved by public and private managers in other crowd-based projects as wise and technological prepared participants
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