Inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) play a critical role in today’s organizations and their relationships with business partners. While large organizations already began utilizing IOIS at the outset, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have subsequently been reluctant to adopt and use IOIS. As such systems are subject to high network effects, a firm thus has to reach out especially to its SME partners to achieve a critical mass of adopters among them. Prior research agrees that the provision of support in terms of circumstantial information and expertise can influence organizational adoption decisions. However, research in this direction has remained inconclusive. This study conducts a controlled field experiment at the organizational level to investigate the provision of support as a non-coercive persuasion strategy to foster the adoption of IOIS among 203 SME business partners of a large German organization. A cluster analysis is further conducted to identify distinct clusters of IOIS adopters showing significantly different adoption rates that result from informing them as a strategy. The results first offer evidence for the importance of informing SMEs as a viable strategy to foster IOIS adoption among them. Furthermore, the results provide empirical evidence for the presence of particular arrangements of characteristics describing the strategy and structure of analyzed organizations that ultimately interact with the effect of the provision of support as a persuasion strategy.

Inter-organizational information systems (IOS) play a critical role in today’s organizations and their relationships with business partners. While large organizations began utilizing such systems since their dawn in the 1970’s, SMEs have largely been reluctant to adopt and use these technologies. Given their relative commonness among enterprises, SMEs and micro-firms are particularly well suited to provide the critical mass of adopters needed to exploit network externalities exhibited by IOS. However, studies on adoption of IOS featuring micro-firms have remained scarce. Hence, a special focus on adoption decisions in micro-firms can be of great value to advance the understanding of IOS adoption. A survey is conducted on the influence of inhibitors on adoption of IOS for electronic invoice exchange among German SMEs and micro-firms. Several inhibitors are identified from extant literature restraining SMEs from adopting. In particular, results show that reasons restraining micro-firms are significantly different from reasons restraining larger SMEs.

Open standard-based inter-organizational information systems play a critical role in today’s organizations and their relationships with business partners. However, theoretical understanding of organizational adoption of such systems in existing research is limited. Prior studies highlight the role of the external business environment in influencing organizational adoption of such systems, but lack focus on the various environmental context characteristics influencing organizational adoption decisions. This study conducts a structured analysis of scientific literature on factors of the organizational, technological, and environmental contexts that are able to influence the organizational adoption of open standard-based inter-organizational information systems. Using the results of the literature analysis, this study focuses on the critical role of the business environment in influencing organizational adoption of such systems and derives a typology of environmental context characteristics exhibiting inherently differing types of business environment related influence on organizational adoption decisions. The derived typology leads to a better theoretical understanding of organizational adoption of such systems and provides practitioners with a structured view on the external forces operating in the business environment of their organization. Finally, the study discusses important implications for future research in this context as well as for decision makers considering the adoption of particular systems.

Organizations striving to compete in today’s harsh economic environment are forced to continuously innovate to retain competitiveness over time. The use of interorganizational systems (IOS) is one way for organizations to gain competitive advantage. This paper attempts to investigate the adoption of IOS by means of a controlled field-experiment on organizational level. Relevant scientific literature on this topic largely agrees that two main factors of influence – circumstantial information, and institutional pressure – are assumed to have a strong influence on adoption intention of organizations. By conducting a field experiment across 504 business partners of a larger German organization, we find evidence for the relationship between institutional pressure and IOS adoption, while no support is found for the relation between circumstantial information and IOS adoption.

The objective of this paper is to examine national cultural factors that may influence citizen adoption of eGovernment websites in two culturally different countries: Germany and Slovakia. In this purpose we developed a behavioural model basing on the three columns: Trust, culture and habitual patterns. We used the Hofstede’s national culture dimensions in combination with latest research in IS adoption and eGovernment as theoretical basement. Based on survey data collected from a total of 576 German and Slovak citizens, our research holds the following contributions: The first is, that uncertainty avoidance has a significant impact on citizens’ attitude to adopt eGovernment Services, but only in one of the two countries, which emphasizes the importance of cultural differences with respect to development stages in eGovernment in a country. Second, our data indicated that habitual patterns of citizens to personally handle services at government agencies significantly inhibit their eGovernment adoption behavior within both countries. Third, general trust and thus in the public sector and thus a governments reputation positively influences the adoption of eGovernment Services by its citizens.

The Open Access (OA) movement, which postulates gratis and unrestricted online access to publicly funded research findings, has significantly gained momentum in recent years. The two ways of achieving OA are self-archiving of scientific work by the authors (Green OA) and publishing in OA journals (Gold OA). But there is still no consensus which model should be supported in particular. The aim of this simulation study is to discover mechanisms and predict developments that may lead to specific outcomes of possible market transformation scenarios. It contributes to theories related to OA by substantiating the argument of a citation advantage of OA articles and by visualizing the mechanisms of a journal system collapsing in the long-term due to the continuation of the serials crisis. The practical contribution of this research stems from the integration of all market players: Decisions regarding potential financial support of OA models can be aligned with our findings, as well as the decision of a publisher to migrate his/her journals to Gold OA. Our results indicate that for scholarly communication in general, a transition to Green OA combined with a certain level of subscription-based publishing and a migration of few top journals is the most beneficial development.

"Planned behavior" is a widely-known paradigm used to predict individual behavior. Basing on a competing paradigm called “goal-directed automaticity”, research addressed the mutual support of both paradigms – thus the importance of habits for the continued usage. A versus between both paradigms – thus the inhibiting effect of habits on the adoption of a new system was thematized in 2012 by Polites and Karahanna. Within this research, both concepts are brought face to face by examining the results of an empirical survey of 378 County employees who were separated into adopter and non-adopter groups. Given this opposing behavioral outcome, the moderating effect of habit on the relationship between affect/cognition and intention was examined by means of a group-based regression approach. The results show opposing patterns for both groups which holds the implication that the directional impact of habit strength on this relationship is likewise opposing.

The digitalization of invoices and their processing is a key factor for the improvement of process efficiency on the G2B (government-to-business) and G2G (government-to-government) level. Some European countries like Denmark or Spain already started to mandate electronic invoicing, but most other countries in the European Union are still in the planning phase for implementation. This weak adoption rate hinders governments to generate benefits of electronic invoicing, so an understanding of this fact from a public sector perspective is crucial. Still, the majority of preceding studies investigated electronic invoicing from a private sector perspective. In addition to that, an overarching model explaining electronic invoicing adoption is still missing. This paper develops a unifying meta-model of influencing factors of electronic invoicing adoption on governmental level by analyzing relevant literature and by conducting expert interviews. The paper then discusses implications for future research with a focus on the public sector.

"Planned behavior" is a widely-known paradigm used to predict individual behavior. Basing on a competing paradigm called “goal-directed automaticity”, research addressed the mutual support of both paradigms – thus the importance of habits for the continued usage. A versus between both paradigms – thus the inhibiting effect of habits on the adoption of a new system was thematized in 2012 by Polites and Karahanna. Within this research, both concepts are brought face to face by examining the results of an empirical survey of 378 County employees who were separated into adopter and non-adopter groups. Given this opposing behavioral outcome, the moderating effect of habit on the relationship between affect/cognition and intention was examined by means of a group-based regression approach. The results show opposing patterns for both groups which holds the implication that the directional impact of habit strength on this relationship is likewise opposing.

In order to improve the governmental efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, an important part of e-government is the digitalization of documents and the processing of these documents through electronic channels. Such a critical document in business process chains is the invoice, which is why the European Commission strives to increase the adoption and diffusion of electronic invoicing e-invoicing among public and private sector organizations. However, the adoption rate among businesses is still low and especially very small firms resist using e-invoicing. By collecting quantitative and qualitative survey data of 416 German companies resisting the usage of e-invoicing, we confirm and explore factors affecting the resistant behavior towards the electronic exchange of invoices and elaborate on differences in those factors with organizational size. In particular among micro firms, the lack of knowledge regarding the theme and procedure of e-invoicing represents the relatively most important influencing factor, while comparatively larger firms also expect huge change management efforts.

User attitudes are a major predictor of the endogenous variables in ICT adoption models. However it is known in the community that the predictive validity of user attitudes on behavioral intention to adopt ICT suffers from inconsistencies. Being a basic predictor of behavioral intention in models like TRA or TPB, user attitudes turned out not to be predictive of behavior in other studies [1]. Some authors have addressed this problem and introduced solution approaches based on splitting the construct into four different sub constructs. This paper evaluates these approaches on the basis of social psychological literature, PLS results of a survey, and scientometric data of fourteen IS top journals. The findings indicate that the problem of insignificance is not caused by a conceptual misspecification, but rather by a combination of conceptual and situational factors affecting the relationship between attitude and behavioral intention.

The adoption of Cloud Computing (CC) is growing rapidly. However, studies on the adoption of these new technologies by individual users are rare and almost exclusively focused on the business context. This paper presents first results of a research project addressing the adoption of CC by individual researchers and small research groups in Higher Education institutions. We surveyed users of the Frankfurt Cloud, an IaaS environment provided at the Goethe University of Frankfurt that serves affiliated researchers with on-demand computing and storage resources. On the one hand, the findings indicate that users benefit from fast and easy access to computing power for their research, on the other hand, user concerns related to cloud adoption are identified, which have to be taken into account during further development of CC services for academic research.

Throughout the whole history of IS adoption research, researchers struggled to frame, conceptualize, and define social norms in a sufficient way. While research during the last three years provided helpful advice to overcome this challenge, it still remains the question, why other shapes of norms (e.g. cultural norms, religious norms, moral norms, or legal norms) were hardly ever framed or discussed for IS adoption research. To provide a first step within this direction, this research offers a conceptual extension of normative beliefs for the Model of Adoption of Technology in Households (MATH) (Venkatesh and Brown 2001, Brown and Venkatesh 2005) using the norm topology by Gibbs (1965) of sociology research. An operationalization of the new constructs is provided and further steps of this research in progress are discussed.

The continuing growth of Web 2.0 applications and the increased collaboration through these socio-technical platforms reorder whole disciplines and industries. The resultant facilitation of worldwide communication and cooperation also offers compelling opportunities for education and research. With Open Access as basic paradigm, Science 2.0 refers to new practices of researchers who publish, communicate or organize their work by using Web 2.0 technologies. The research aim of this paper is twofold. Since it is a multi-faceted paradigm and due to its heterogeneous applications difficult to comprehend, we first attempt to define Science 2.0 by delineating it from related concepts. Second, after describing prevalent Science 2.0 applications, we develop a framework for evaluating those. In detail, we address the following research questions: What is Science 2.0? From which applications can a scientist choose from, if he/she wants to apply Science 2.0? Which factors determine the value of a specific Science 2.0 application for an individual scientist or a research group? It is suggested that when calculating the value of a specific application or concept, the expected benefits (e. g., time saving, cost reduction, quality improvement), risks and efforts on the one side, and the suitability to the underlying research purpose on the other side should be taken into account. To be effective for a specific research purpose, the Science 2.0 application has to match the functional focus (Information vs. Communication vs. Organization) and non-functional requirements (e. g. ease of use, reliability) on the one hand. On the other hand, the applications must meet the needs of the respective scientific environment (e. g., research group, target community, content type). As theoretical contribution the paper provides a detailed classification of Science 2.0. In practice, the framework could serve as decision support for an individual scientist or a research team when choosing a Science 2.0 application to work with.

The last financial and economic crisis demonstrated the dysfunctional long-term effects of aggressive behaviour in financial markets. Yet, evolutionary game theory predicts that under the condition of strategic dependence a certain degree of aggressive behaviour remains within a given population of agents. However, as the consequences of the financial crisis exhibit, it would be desirable to change the 'rules of the game' in a way that prevents the occurrence of any aggressive behaviour and thereby also the danger of market crashes. The paper picks up this aspect. Through the extension of the in literature well-known Hawk-Dove game by a quantum approach, we can show that dependent on entanglement, also evolutionary stable strategies can emerge, which are not predicted by classical evolutionary game theory and where the total economic population uses a non aggressive quantum strategy.

This paper analyzes the effects of open access (OA) on the creation of scientific knowledge. In a first step, drawing on the theory of Nonaka and colleagues, their SECI model is applied to the processes of knowledge creation in science. Typical activities of the research process are assigned to the four knowledge conversion modes socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. Subsequently, on the basis of the resulting framework it is shown how OA affects scientific knowledge creation. We conclude that (1) with regard to the epistemological dimension of knowledge, OA decreases the time of running through the SECI cycle, and (2) concerning the ontological dimension, OA enlarges the number of possible receivers of newly created knowledge. Those propositions provide a basis for further empirical studies within the introduced framework.

The article describes first results of a survey concerning publication behavior in respect of Open Access, which included the answers of about 2.000 scientists from different German universities. The study is part of a project funded by the German Research Association, which deals with economic implications of Open Access policies and is carried out by researchers from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and Victoria University in Canberra (Australia). Amongst other topics the evaluation of the German National License Program and the analysis of the hesitating adaption of Open Access models are main objectives of the project. Both goals are represented within the presented survey.

Purpose - This paper aims at analysing the impact of open access (OA) on the creation, retrieval and transfer of scientific knowledge. In doing so, the focus is set on scientific research as one core function of higher education institutions. It also aims to identify potential advantages of OA over traditional subscription-based publishing models from the viewpoint of academic scientists.Design/methodology/approach - The approach of this study can be classified as analytical conceptual research. First the SECI model of organisational knowledge creation is applied to knowledge management in science (with the university as organisation). In a second step the resulting framework is used to describe influences of OA on the management of scientific knowledge.Findings - OA accelerates the creation and widens the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Subject-based repositories are suggested to provide the best conditions for retrieval of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, in terms of economic efficiency, OA has the potential to significantly decrease the costs of scholarly communication.Research limitations/implications - In this paper the focus of investigation is academic research. Thus in order to get the "big picture" the influence of openly accessible information on knowledge management processes in teaching and administration should also be evaluated. The approach used in this paper seems to be suitable for such an analysis.Practical implications - The findings of the paper are of interest for policy makers in higher education institutions especially when facing decisions regarding the (financial) support of OA initiatives.Originality/value - The paper adds a theoretically sound approach of analysing OA impacts to the existing literature in this field.