Katariina Yrjönkoski — Tampere University of Technology, Finland
The very rst International Workshop on Software-intensive Business: Start-ups,
Ecosystems and Platforms (SiBW 2018) was held in Espoo (Greater Helsinki),
Finland on December 3rd, 2018 { just a day before SLUSH 2018, the world's
biggest startup event. Thanks to the collaboration with the organizers of SLUSH,
many of the software-intensive business researchers and practitioners took part
also in this event.
The international workshop gathered together 35 registered attendees, from
Sweden, Germany, Latvia, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands representing both
academia as well as industry. The event itself was sponsored by VTT
Technical Research Centre of Finland and the workshop was organized by the newly
founded Software-intensive Business research community (c.f. [
1
]) together with
Software Startup Research Network (SSRN)1.
This year's workshop consisted of 19 workshop papers and a seminal keynote.
All papers submitted to the workshop were reviewed by at least two members of
the program committee and the papers were selected according to their
suggestions. As always, our sincere thanks go to the reviewers { in total, the 57 review
statements contained nearly 28,000 words. We are thankful to the members of
the program committee for the time and passion they have put into giving useful
advices on how to improve the papers.
As a result, the workshop presented a broad view on the recent development
in the eld of software-intensive business within the selected focal areas. All in
all, the program committee highlighted four themes across the papers: startups,
new product development, business models and ecosystems. These categorizations
give an interesting vantage point to the ongoing debate in the eld of
softwareintensive business. Our discussion generally focuses on new venture creation,
value creation and value capture | themes much researched but still lacking in
software speci c explanations. This set the tone of this year's workshop.
Software startups. The workshop day was opened by Jason Grendus with his
keynote presentation titled \Business Angel Mindset". In his presentation,
Grendus shared his experiences on working with, and as one of angel investors.
Klotins [
2
] continued the theme by asking the question \...[A]re start-ups
snow akes?" The work made an e ort to understand if, and to which extent,
software startups are unique in how they approach software engineering. Klotins
[
2
] took a narrow view of engineering; we can of course ask the same question
more broadly: How unique are software-intensive business and to which extent
it warrants its own research. Much of the workshop actually focused on just
this, highlighting the software speci c undertones in the broader understanding
about business, management, and engineering.
1 https://www.softwarestartups.org
Kemell et al. [
3
] showed through a grey literature review over a hundred
metrics for software startups. Many of these make sense in a broader analysis
of business and engineering, but some show clear speci city on understanding
software-intensive business. Khanna and Wang [
4
] presented a framework on how
startup teams could utilize experience-based learning in their work.
Software-intensive business, particularly through platforms, is a low entry
barrier business driven by minimum viable product experimentation. This has
many research implications. It highlights the importance of education on new
venture creation. Gutbrod and Munch [
5
] look at teaching lean startup principles
and in particularly how entrepreneurs can identify core assumptions in a
fastpaced business environment. In the same line, Chanin et al. [
6
] looked at how
software startup education impacts the success or failure of startups.
Yrjonkoski and Suominen [
7
] studied e ectuation as a frame for network
decisions in a software startup. Their results show that e ectuation behaviour might
be an useful approach for managers in the early fuzzy phases of a startup. In
addition, they point out avenues for further work on the concept of e ectuation.
New product development. The eld of software-intensive business is tightly
intertwined with the actual development of software artifacts. To foster the
development of the eld, Schonhofen et al. [
8
] address in their paper how the
ISO 16355 standard can be used to support the development of the
softwareintensive eld. The standard, which is based on Quality Function Deployment
(QFD), seems a promising starting point for future work.
With a similar focus, Saltan et al. [
9
] identi ed new research directions for
software product management based on a case study focusing on ve
softwareintensive companies. Melegati & Wang [
10
] focused their understanding on how
software startups innovate in the dynamic market, nding that literature did
not di erentiate startups based on the innovations they develop, leaving much
for further research to uncover. Munch et al. [
11
] addressed, in their study, the
problems of the traditional roadmapping in a software-intensive company. They
conclude that the traditional approach is not suitable anymore in agile and
innovative environments.
Bosch et al. [
12
] identi ed, from their empirical material, three di erent
approaches to the software development: Requirement-driven, Outcome-driven and
AI-driven development approaches. Their study presents a new and interesting
way to characterize software development work in companies. In addition, Bosch
et al. [
12
] provided a framework for deciding when and what approach to use.
Business models. As the eld of software-intensive business aims to cross the
gap between technology and business, also business models were strongly present
in the workshop. Spijkerman and Jansen [
13
] presented a survey on ten
opensource software companies' business models and summarize their key ndings as
an open-source software business model blueprint.
Saltan and Se ah [
14
] presented a mapping study for identifying the technical
and business challenges of SaaS adoptions. As a result, they present a framework
for identifying the challenges and required a formation of a research agenda.
vii
Yrjonkoski [
15
] continued the same line of research by surveying literature on how
small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should organize the transformation
from on-premise products to SaaS solutions. His results show, that while results
from large enterprises with enough time and resources have been presented, there
is a lack of work reporting how SMEs have carried out the transformation with
fewer resources.
Ecosystems & platforms. Also software ecosystems and platforms were presented
in the workshop. Molenaar et al. [
16
] studied how partners perceive the keystone's
power in a software ecosystem. Their study reveals new insights in
partnerkeystone dynamics in the software ecosystems. Joelsson et al. [
17
] continued the
same approach and went on to highlight the active role of prosumers | \users
who consume as well as produce" | in the studied software ecosystem. This
type of actors is speci c to digital environments and their role is understudied.
Petrik and Herzwurm [
18
] studied industrial Internet of Things (iIoT)
platforms and based on the interviews, they present a business model taxonomy
for iIoT platforms. Hajikhani [
19
] focused on social media platforms and
entrepreneurial discussions in smart cities. By focusing on the case of London, his
study advances our understanding on social media's impact on an innovation
and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Turunen and Mantymaki [
20
] observed a lack of understanding of
psychosocial dynamics in ecosystem studies. They use the concept of collective
consciousness as a tool for characterizing the ecosystems as complex networks of
heterogeneous actors. Their study works as an interesting opening to ecosystem
scholars to widen the approaches used to understand the complex phenomenon.
December 2018
Sami Hyrynsalmi, Arho Suominen, Christopher Jud, Xiaofeng Wang, Jan Bosch & Jurgen Munch
viii