On humankind's path to a carbon-neutral existence, the reduction of household-caused emissions plays a significant role. Digitalisation, especially sustainable smart home technology (SHT), can play an important role in facilitating this reduction. However, there is still a limited understanding of the adoption or diffusion of such household technologies and how they might play a pivotal role in enabling behavioural change towards a more climate conscious society. Over thirty years after the beginning of technology adoption research, and more than ten years after the start of sustainability research in the IS discipline, this chapter aims to look in the rear-view mirror, summarise the route, and draw the way ahead. It is meant to provide basic knowledge about the emerging phenomena of digitalisation of homes by private individuals and how this can contribute to sustainability and therefore to engage the attentive reader for research within the field of sustainable SHT.

Many firms use social media (SM) to solicit online investments. In this study, we examine the interaction between SM attributes and online-investment attributes to determine how this interaction shapes users’ investment decisions. Specifically, we investigate initial coin offerings (ICOs) as an application domain of distributed ledger technology for peer-to-peer investment. We use signaling theory to develop a context-specific explanation for how the interplay of persuasion signals found in SM and technology-enforced lockups shapes individuals’ ICO investment decisions. To evaluate this interplay, we conducted a 2 × 2 factorial experiment with 473 participants. The results show that when an investment does not require a technology-enforced lockup, persuasion signals encourage investments in ICOs; however, when an investment requires a technology-enforced lockup, persuasion signals do not affect investments in ICOs. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that combining a technology-enforced lockup and persuasion signals reduces the ICO’s plausibility. This is the first study to investigate how the willingness to invest in ICOs is influenced by the relationship between technology-enforced lockups and persuasion signals. The findings have practical implications for individuals attempting to make sound decisions on ICO investments, policymakers regulating online investments, and firms seeking to attract investors.

Digitalization has permeated all aspects of human lives, economies, and societies. This transformation has been driven by the rapid growth in computing power, storage capabilities, and data transmission infrastructures. These changes have enabled innovations, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, smartphones, digitalized homes, (semi) autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and more. Digitalization has further resulted in faster, more effective service delivery by many organizations. The phenomenon of digitalization relies on an increasingly finite supply of resources, such as crude oil, silicon, and energy. Over the past 150 years, humans have consumed as many natural resources as they have consumed in the past 20,000 years. In part, this increasing clip of consumption has been driven by digitalization, as novel, technology-based solutions, such as blockchain, supplant older, slower low-tech solutions, such as books and ledgers, to process data and create value. Digitalization’s demand for resources may be leading us to an environmental abyss. Consider cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, whose electricity consumption is approximately equal to the energy needs of small nations such as Malaysia or Sweden. Such consumption evokes the question, is, “is more digitalization really better, or given the harm to the planet, is this one context where less is more?”. In this paper, we develop a research agenda for understanding the full cost of digitalization and its impact on sustainability. We do so in three parts; first, we offer a crisp definition of sustainability; second, we offer a concise review of the digitalization and sustainability literature; and third, we offer suggestions for research that advances our understanding of how digitalization impacts sustainability.

While prior research on gig work environments studied necessary technical skills for information systems development (ISD) professionals and how they can be developed, the improvement of non-technical skills (NTS) has been rarely explored. However, to successfully engage in the gig work economy, the need for strong NTS is increasing. Based on an experiential learning theory (ELT) perspective, we explore how ISD professionals engaging in the gig economy develop NTS by following grounded theory methodology. Our results are threefold: first, we identify crucial NTS for gig workers. Second, we uncover how these NTS are developed in different phases of adapting to working on gig economy platforms. Third, we reveal several strategies for thriving in the gig economy. Based on our findings we develop a process model of non-technical skill development and discuss this model in relation to implications for gig economy literature and practice.

In times of climate change and growing urbanization, the way food is produced and consumed also changes. Meanwhile, digitization is transforming farming practices, which also applies to the domestic growing of crops. More and more so-called smart home farms (SHF) are finding their way into private households. This paper conceptualizes the unique nature of enabled smart services and their underlying technology. Following an inductive interpretive approach, this study explores the antecedents of smart home farming practices. Our sample consists of eleven actual smart home farmers. We found six constructs to be of salient importance: expected outcomes related to harvesting, positive feelings, and sustainability; a combination of one's affinity for green and novel technologies; and the smartness and visibility of the enabled services. In the outlook, we present some preliminary thoughts for testing our qualitative findings.

Crowdfunding has become a viable alternative to traditional venture capital and business angel funding. However, new ventures are prone to failure despite exceeding their funding goals. Extant literature presents broad knowledge of the antecedents of crowdfunding success but lacks insights into the causes and consequences of entrepreneurial failure, especially failure after massive overfunding via crowdfunding. We use a qualitative narrative approach to investigate how massive overfunding in crowdfunding threatens entrepreneurial activities. We present our findings as a taxonomy of the causes of failure, at the environmental, firm, and individual levels, based on actual cases that failed after receiving massive overfunding. Our framework challenges established thinking on resources and financing as measures of entrepreneurial success by providing insights into the processes leading to failure despite availability of resources. This serves as a reference for backers aiming to safely invest via crowdfunding and for startups to avoid the common pitfalls of overfunding.

Collecting large amounts of user information is becoming an increasingly important source of value for businesses. Such data sets may be expanded through engaging in value co-creation with other organizations. Sharing user information across organizations, however, might evoke users’ privacy concerns. Existing mechanisms and concepts developed in prior information privacy research on sharing information between one user and one organization may no longer apply as multiple organizations become involved. This creates the necessity to understand more granularly how users perceive privacy situations that involve sharing their information across organizations – and how their concerns may be alleviated through control mechanisms. Employing the lens of Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, we conceptualize this phenomenon as Interorganizational Information Sharing (IIS) and theorize on perceived uncertainty and control to unravel user perceptions in IIS. We present our ideas for a research model, as well as our planned methodology for empirical validation.

While today consumers benefit from personalised service offerings, they are also understandably concerned about the privacy risks generated by disclosing their personal information online. We know that such perceived risks in general shape behaviour, but we know little about what specific privacy risks obstruct the use of digital services, making it difficult to implement technologies that could mitigate these risks. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies involving over 1000 participants, we conceptualise and quantify a multidimensional perspective on privacy risks consisting of physical, social, resource‐related, psychological, prosecution‐related, career‐related and freedom‐related privacy risks. Our results explicate the prospects of distinguishing privacy risk dimensions by demonstrating how they are differently pronounced across contexts and how technology designs can be tailored to assuage them. Thus, our findings improve the understanding of context and service‐specific privacy risks, helping managers to adjust their digital offerings to mitigate users' privacy risk perceptions.

In response to the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, various developers turned to smartphone-based contact tracing to address the challenges of manual tracing. Due to the presence of network effects, i.e., the effectiveness of contact tracing applications increases with the number of users, information technology standards were critical to the technology's success. The standardization efforts in Europe led to a variety of trade-offs concerning the choice of an appropriate technological architecture due to the contradictory tensions resulting from the dualism between the need for contact tracing data to contain the pandemic and the need for data minimization to preserve user privacy. Drawing predominantly on the software platform and standards literature, we conduct an interpretive case study to examine the emergence and consequences of this multi-layered decision situation. Our findings reveal how Google and Apple were able to limit the individual leeway of external developers, thereby effectively resolving the European standards war. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the various short-term and long-term trade-offs associated with the standardization of contact tracing applications and translate our findings into recommendations for policy makers with respect to future crisis situations. Specifically, we propose a strategy grounded in our data that enables responsible actors to make goal-oriented and rapid decisions under time constraints.