Call for Papers

The 32nd Bled eConference : Humanizing Technology for a Sustainable Society

The Bled eConference has been shaping electronic interactions since 1988. Implementation of novel information technologies leads enterprises and governments towards digital transformation. Digital transformation will not be successful, if sustainable aspect of human and social development will not be considered. European Commission (2018) emphasizes that in the future, competitiveness will be dependent on the ability to move towards sustainability, resource-efficiency and the ability to exploit the advantages of digital technologies. In the context of digital society, implementation of digital technologies and novel solutions to achieve higher efficiency, effectiveness and competitive advantage is insufficient. Society calls for different economy models; more responsible, righteous and less exploitative. Digital technologies should be used to implement and design business models, which will be sensitive for sustainable development in all aspects – economic, environmental and social (triple bottom line).  The community of Bled eConference aims to remain an active contributor in shaping of economic and social growth, with environmental sensibility, and thus raising wellbeing of citizens around the world.

  • a fully-refereed Research Track and research in progress track, devoted to researchers in all aspects of digital transformation;
  • Doctoral Consortium, offering students to present their ongoing master’s and PhD study results;
  • ePrototype Students Bazaar, offering students opportunities to present innovative e- or m-Business or Internet of Things ideas, models, prototypes and apps;
  • a Business and Government Panel Track which attracts eminent business and government leaders from Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific;
  • Business, Government and Academic Workshops and Meetings offering unparalleled opportunities to discuss, share and learn with colleagues from around the world;
  • EU projects dissemination meetings; enabling project partners to connect with other similar projects and to disseminate results to a wider community.

The Bled’s highlights:

We invite submissions in all areas of research, teaching, and business related to the Digitial Economy and Society with special emphasises on digital transformation.

Submitted papers should make a significant contribution to theory, knowledge, and practice in the areas of information management, information systems, information technology and information resources management. Papers based on both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, in all traditional as well as new areas of Management Information Systems, Business Informatics, Computer Science, or Technology Management are accepted.

We encourage submissions related to the conference theme, and also from the parts that build the Digital Economy and Society, including:

Digital Transformation I eInnnovations I Security & Privacy I Future of Work I Internet of Things I IoT I Big Data I Business Analytics I Business Intelligence I eAnalytics I Open data I Digital Services I Blockchain I Business and Organizational Models I Digital Business Models I AI I BI I Data Science I eCollaboration I Social Media I eCommerce I eBusiness I Interorganizational Systems I eMarketplaces & Communities I Mobile Value Services I Cloud Computing I eHealth & mHealth I Digital Wellness & Wellbeing I Sustainability I Sustainable Development I Smart Cities I Smart Regions I Sustainable Digitial Economy and Society I Smart Communities I eSociety I eParticipation I eLearning 2.0 & eEducation I eSMEs I Industry 4.0 I eLiving Labs I eCollaboration I eRegions I eTourism I eDependency I eTrust I ePrivacy I any other aspect of “e”

Next to a general track on the Digital transformation, we offer the following special interest tracks for Bled 2019:

eHealth (Track Co-Chairs: Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Epworth HealthCare and Deakin University, Australia and Juergen Seitz, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany):

In 2019 we want to emphasize the role that e- and m- technologies can play in finding the balance between societal costs on the one hand and the empowerment and wellbeing of citizens/patients on the other. Can we find ways to organize healthcare closer to patients’ need which is also of a high quality, less intrusive and at lower costs? How is digitization changing healthcare processes? Can Domotics, the Internet of Things, and the quantified self-help in this effort? And how do we safeguard that the data are not abused?

Digital Wellness (Track Co-Chairs: Christer Carlsson, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research and Åbo Akademi University, Finland and Pirkko Walden, Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research and Åbo Akademi University, Finland):

Digital Wellness works out the design and use of digital services to build and sustain wellness routines for large groups of users. “Wellness” – to be in sufficiently good shape of mind and body to be successful with all everyday requirements – builds on systematic and effective changes of daily routines to make them motivating and sustainable for users for extended periods (years, more than months). Digital wellness services are  effective interventions in daily routines; they collect data from the users’ everyday activities through smartphones and wearables; the data is refined to information and knowledge with analytics and computational intelligence; data from activity programs are not health data and do not carry the same limitations on usability. The EU emphasizes the needs, challenges and opportunities brought by the ageing society. In the Digital Wellness Track we pay special attention to the “young elderly”, the age group 60-75, as interventions with digital wellness services will have significant long-term possibilities to get healthy “seniors” (the age group 75+). We welcome papers on digital services for wellness, independent living, Internet of Things as part of wellness routines, new business models to reach “young elderly” and the design of supporting ecosystems.

Blockchain (Track Co-Chair:  Roger Bons, Professor, FOM Hochschule, Germany and Johan Versendaal, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and Open University of the Netherlands, Netherlands):

New ways to organize economic activities are emerging, facilitated by Blockchain as an enabling technology. The attention for the Blockchain (or sometimes “distributed ledger”) technology has been rising steadily. Emerging from the Cypherpunk movement and the Bitcoin technology, it is taking businesses and industries time to recognize that the underlying technology might be the next big thing to disrupt their current business model. The disruptive potential is created by the positioning of the technology as something that lives between organisations and not within them, promising a boost in efficiency and effectiveness in inter-organizational coordination and rising questions about who is in control, if anyone, for networked businesses coordinated through a Blockchain.

In this Call for Papers, we are looking to further qualify this potential and to move beyond the current  claims that the Blockchain should eliminate traditional intermediaries, such as (electronic) markets, banks or even governments, and that disruption is its primary purpose. However, the technology can also play a more evolutionary role in the development of new coordination mechanisms. For instance, the distributed and autonomous execution model enables the emergence of “Distributed Autonomous Organisations or DAOs” (Diedrich, 2016), which is “more than using the Blockchain to manage a company: the code is the entire company”. The transparency of the system and the assurance that all participants will play by the rules since that is the only way the DAO operates makes this an interesting candidate for a new generation of electronic markets. Under what conditions such a DAO will be initiated by a completely new disruptive entity, or whether it is a new role for an existing player, is one of the topics for this Call for Papers.

Blockchain might also facilitate and contribute to other new coordination mechanisms, such as the sharing economy, the circular economy as well as smart grids that help businesses and private households to become independent in their energy provisioning. Several Blockchain initiatives are indeed on their way, most notably Ethereum, Hyperledger, the R3 Project, Aeternity to name just a few, in various stages of maturity.

The challenge for scientists now is to distinguish between the hype and the core value of this phenomenon, to reason about the business potential including the potential to disrupt trusted business models, but also to address some of the deeper technical foundations such as scalability, accountability and security. We are looking to broaden the understanding in order to help organisations and societies in reaping the benefits.

Possible topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:

  • The effect of Blockchain on networked business models
  • Characteristics of business models that will be most disrupted by Blockchain
  • The evolution of “trust” and “trusted third parties” in a Blockchain enabled world
  • Assets and capabilities Blockchain enabled organizations should have
  • The integration of Blockchain technology in existing inter- and intra-organizational IT architectures
  • The resolution of governance conflicts that arise when the technology is utilized in highly regulated environments such as banking or healthcare, especially in case of DAOs
  • Solutions for technical issues, such as scalability and security
  • The ramifications of having anonymous or pseudonymous actors in transactions, especially in a cross-jurisdiction setting
  • The design of trustworthy smart contracts

We encourage contributions with a broad range of methodological approaches, including conceptual, qualitative and quantitative research.

Big Data/Data Science (Track Co-Chair: Guido Ongena, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Netherlands and Sanda Martinčić Ipšić, University of Rijeka, Croatia):

Propelled by computational power, the availability of (big and unstructured) data, major advancements in machine intelligence and unprecedented speeds at which analytics need to be generated and delivered, a wealth of new questions and opportunities arises in creating value to governmental bodies and businesses. As organizations transform into data and analytics centric enterprises, more research is needed not only on the technical aspects of analytics such as data science algorithms, computing infrastructure, but also on various other organizational issues in the business analytics context (e.g. managerial, strategic, leadership, data governance and inter-organizational issues). For this track, we invite technical, theoretical, design science, pedagogical and behavioural research as well as novel implementations of data analytics & visualization for varied data (or sources) such as sensors or Internet of Things (IoT) data, text, multimedia, business operations, clickstreams and user-generated content. We welcome papers examining a wide-range of contexts including healthcare, security, energy, marketing, supply-chain, technology, service, hospitality, education, transportation, fraud prevention and the environment.

Possible business-oriented topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:

  • Big Data and Business Transformation
  • Innovative Artefacts for Business Analytics
  • Data Driven Business Modelling
  • Data Driven Process Mining and Innovation
  • Data Strategy and Data Privacy
  • Social and Ethical Issues in Big Data
  • Social Impact of Data Science
  • Competences in the Era of Big Data
  • Data Science and Industry 4.0
  • Big Data Applications / Inovations

Possible technical-oriented topics of submissions include, but are not limited to instantiations of:

  • Datamining / Machine Learning / Deep Learning
  • Process mining
  • Data science
  • Text & Multimedia analytics
  • Social Network (Media) Analytics
  • Real time data analysis / Stream processing
  • Internet of Things (IoT), Sensor data analytics
  • Spatial data analysis / Visualization
  • Open Data / Data Sets

Education and Learning in the Digital Society (Track Co-Chair: Mirjana Kljajić Borštnar, University of Maribor, Slovenia and Matt Glowatz, University College Dublin, Ireland):

Education is changing as technology allows for many new possibilities. New students enter educational institutions with highly developed digital skills. Part-time learning, continuous learning, and immediate-on-the-spot knowledge acquisition change the educational playground. Electronic learning platforms bring together practice, teachers, scholars and students in one environment.
On top of new approaches to learning and teaching, the digital society requires new knowledge, new technical and soft skills.
How does this change education, what are the good practices, how can research and education come together in leveraging new models of learning and teaching? How can we adapt curriculums of the old disciplines to the new reality and how to create curriculums for emerging disciplines?

We encourage research contributions on challenges of education in the digital society.

Smart Cities, Regions & Communities (Track Chair: Hans-Dieter Zimmermann, FHS St. Gallen, Switzerland)

The Smart City idea offers concepts and solutions for cities, communities, as well as regions to cope with current challenges occurring in the form of demographics, urbanization, climate change, resource crises, mobility challenges, global competition as well as open and participatory societies. While the early smart city concepts focused on technology first and foremost nowadays the citizens and their quality of life is the starting point for many activities. In line with the overall theme of the 32nd Bled eConference the track will focus on utilization of any technology to contribute to the quality of life of citizens. As especially in Europe cities a rather small in average and often linked to further communities in a region, the track will focus on smart cities, communities as well as regions. Therefore, the track continues the eRegion tradition of the Bled eConference. We look forward to receiving papers addressing various issues of a smart city, such as, strategies, frameworks, concrete solutions and cases, service and business models, benefits and challenges, covering all the various smart city dimensions from smart energy over smart mobility and sharing economy to smart governments and smart citizens, utilizing different methodological approaches.

Business Models (Track Co-Chair: Mirjana Kljajić Borštnar, University of Maribor, Slovenia, Christian Kittl, evolaris next level Research Centre, Austria and Andreja Pucihar, University of Maribor, Slovenia)

Digital transformation and implementation of digital technologies affect current business models (BM) of enterprises and societies as well as enable development of new disruptive business models. We invite qualitative and quantitative research papers addressing different fields of BM as for example digital technologies affecting value creation, new product and service development and/or delivery, new ways of CRM, new types of networked business models, etc. We are also interested in BM innovation approaches, practices and tools used for BM innovation e.g. user involvement, open innovation, customer centered design.

CALL FOR RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

A part of the conference program  will be dedicated to interactive presentations on visionary ideas, showcases and research-in-progress. Through short presentations (possibly enhanced with posters) delegates will be able to show their (preliminary) research and receive feedback in an interactive way. Authors will present their contributions as a part of the conference program. We invite submissions as short papers with possibly associated posters on topics related to the conference’s main theme and special interest themes. Accepted submissions will be enclosed in the proceedings as short papers.

Please see also other options for participation at the conference:

Publications

All accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings (CD with ISBN and CIP number and online).

In 2019 we have secured the partnership of the following journals:

that may facilitate the publication of enhanced versions of further selected papers. Several “Special Issues” have resulted from Bled eConferences, giving the authors of selected papers ample opportunity to get rated publications as a direct and immediate result from being at Bled.

Instructions for Authors for Full Research Papers and Research-in-Progress Papers will soon be available under the Submission section.

More information: bledconference@fov.uni-mb.si

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THE BLED eCONFERENCE: A LONG TRADITION

Since its very beginning it has been a conference that focuses on relevance with rigor as the underpinning foundation for contributions. This has always made the conference an excellent podium for testing out new ideas and research in progress, for senior and junior researchers alike. Not mentioning the number of partnerships between researchers that have originated at Bled and leading to fruitful cooperation.

Bled also has a long tradition of coaching young researchers and students. Doctoral Consortium has been on the program since the early 1990s with the ambition to help young PhD candidates to sharpen their research proposals and to help them find international colleagues working on similar themes.

Finally, another important reason for coming to Bled is the excellent location and facilities at and near the venue. Many professional and personal friendships originate from Bled, during one of the many social events or the morning run around the lake. We are eager to meet you in 2019 to participate in the truly unique experience that makes the Bled eConference.