Internet of Things (IoT) refers to networks with billions of physical devices for collecting, sharing and utilizing data in the virtual world. Most of IoT applications centralize security assurance in creating, authenticating, transferring, or delating system components. However, the centralization exposes its limitations to meet security needs of a rapidly-growing number of things world-widely. How to scale up the applications with assured security becomes a critical challenge. Blockchain Technology (BCT) is a promising solution to provide security and protect privacy in a large scale; especially, smart contracts offer opportunities to improve the reliability of IoT applications. Smart contracts establish trusts for both of data and executed processes. Recently, many literature surveys and positioning articles have been published on the integration of BCT with IoT, but they are limited to superficial discussions of technical potentials, and very few of them have a thorough exploration of the challenges in developing BCT for IoT at technical levels. This paper uses the system design approach to scrutinize the state of the art of study on BCT-based applications and clarify critical research areas of enabling BCT for security assurance: (i) the relations of BCT and IoT are modelled and discussed; (ii) the needs of eliminating threats in IoTbased applications are defined as functional requirements (FRs), existing works on enabling technologies of BCT are defined as the physical solutions (PSs); (iii) the mappings between FRs and PSs are established to identify the limitations and the critical areas for the applications of BCT in large-scale distributed environment.
1 September 2019 in Journal of Industrial Information Integration
Purpose: This study is to compare the impact of organizational agility and flexibility on performance of each type of product innovation (radical vs incremental innovation). Additionally, the moderating effect of technological turbulence on the relationship between the two types of organization is examined.Design/methodology/approach: Based on gaps in the existing literature, the survey data are collected from managers who are in charge of developing new products in three industries: food and beverage, chemical and machinery (N = 431). Confirmatory factory analysis is used to verify measurement items and regression analysis is used to test hypotheses.Findings: The results show that organizational agility increases performance in radical innovation both in a certain situation and an environment with technological turbulence. In contrast, the impact of organizational flexibility is limited to increasing performance in both radical and incremental innovation performance in a certain situation.Originality/value: Our study extends the knowledge of organizational agility and flexibility in the domain of product innovation. Adaptation of organization to respond the technological turbulence will stimulate creativity of new product development teams to produce new useful ideas and transform these ideas to product innovation. The different types of organizing a new product development team to handle technological turbulence will provide different results in product innovation performance. In addition, the findings provide a recommendation on how the organization of a new product development team can improve performance in each type of product innovation under technological turbulence.
19 June 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
Organizational agility is the ability of an organization to transform its capabilities and resources to innovate new values or protect existing values that provide high return. Several studies have investigated the impact of organizational agility on the performance of organizations. However, few studies have explored the impact of the organizational agility of new product development (NPD) teams during the process of NPD on the performance of new products. Additionally, the process of increasing the effectiveness of organizational agility with innovativeness during the NPD process lacks empirical examination. Based on the concept of dynamic capabilities, this article presents a framework to explain the antecedents and consequences of the mediator (organizational agility of product development teams). The moderating role of innovativeness in the NPD process is also proposed. The findings reveal that the organizational agility is important to the firm's successful product innovation because it improves the effectiveness of the fuzzy front end (FFE) in the NPD process. The agility of the development team can be increased by top management support and learning organization. In addition, innovativeness positively moderates the effect of organizational agility on managing FFE. Altogether, these findings provide implications for proficiently managing FFE in the NPD process.