Masterprüfung mit Defensio, Tessa Valentina

27.04.2020 13:30 - 14:30

„Value-driven Design of IoT Products: a Guideline for Shaping Business Models Towards Ethical Innovation“

 

Durchführung per Video-Konferenz (Corona Situation)

An increasing number of objects are connected to the internet, constantly exchanging information about surroundings, people, and machines. This network of devices known as Internet of Things (IoT) and it is quickly evolving to suit an abundance of various applications and domains stretching from industrial IoT to smart cities, smart offices, and smart homes. Thus, this technology, directly or indirectly, is rapidly becoming part of our daily lives. Companies see the opportunity to participate in and profit from this growing market and are rushing to create products, sometimes even without the required IT-expertise. The interests of these companies are often valued more and prioritized over the needs of users. Furthermore, this system of hyper-connected devices still does not present any uniform architecture and it does not currently follow strict standards, which rises further concerns. Scientists and experts in the fields have called for responsible innovation and are recognizing the need to incorporate human values when creating new IoT products. This thesis was authored within the framework of the "COMPASS" project, which strives to create an agile and adaptable compass that can help companies innovating responsibly and creating human-centred, ethical, valuable, empowering and useful solutions. To collect information about how leading companies innovate, interviews and surveys, with focus on processes and values were performed in a large international IT-consulting company. The outcome of the innovation process analysis presented best practices but also challenges regarding gathering feedback from projects as well as conflicts with client’s related constraints. Gathering the right amount of knowledge prior to innovation, balancing between fast and good innovation, pursuing value-based scaling, and making employees familiar with innovation processes are further challenges that, if not addressed, can compromise good innovation. On the base of these findings as well as the principles of the Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) approach, a Value Driven Innovation Method (VDIM) is proposed to support companies when innovating IoT. The VDIM presents a selection of main values to consider and tools to use. It gives an overview to the companies about the values that should drive their decisions in innovation. The feasibility of integrating the VDIM in a company was validated through experts interviews made in large corporations. Besides a general positive feedback, the experts expressed concerns about possible conflicts between the model and the corporate culture as well as the challenge of inserting such model in a non-agile company. The aim of this thesis is to identify concrete innovation values as well as tools to create an agile compass with which companies can steer towards a more human-centred design of IoT and have a value-driven mindset for future innovations.

Organiser:

SPL 5