Each time there was a big change in the communication methods, there will be huge change in the business world. There will be a lot of interesting research questions. Let’s start from our observations.

Amazon Kindle has gained some success since it launched in November 2007. The ad words say "This is the future of book reading". Sure, I believe that the future belongs to electronic devices. Amazon Kindle Store now has tens of thousands of books, newspapers and magazines online. And the amount of contents is still increasing. The price of these contents is much lower than their printed versions, which makes them powerful competitors of the offline content. With my research experience on UGC, several questions come to my mind:

• How should the price be set to make the biggest benefit?
• What’s the effect of UGC (such as customer reviews) on the sales of these contents?

There surely would be competitors when this business grows big. Internet giants (Google, Yahoo, MS, etc) and traditional publish corporations would be competitors in this market. But they may choose different paths in this competition. Free contents with advertisement and charged contents could be two options. It’s too early to say who will win in this game. The business model may become clear in five to ten years as the e-reading becomes more and more popular.

What I want to write here is some observations and thinking about paid content. Traditional publish companies always worry about the decline of profit while transformation into e-publishing. I think people are willing to pay for good content. I’ve been a fan of online fictions since 2005, when I charged some money into my account and became a VIP on Qidian.com. What I observed there shows that paid content online has its market. Readers pay to read the on-going fictions on the website, and they can vote to evaluate the fictions. There are fierce competitions between the authors because the votes and clicks are directly linked to their incomes. I searched about similar sites in the English world, but with no matched results. It seems that people still doubt about reading fiction online. But as I know, it has been a big business in China, Japan and Korea. People not only read them on laptops, but also on mobile devices. With my experience of reading on Qidian, I am curious about what factors will affect the success of fictions.

As I see, when the electronic reading era comes, websites like Qidian would become leading competitors as content distribution channels.

To be continued…

There is a link on the research menu of AIS to “theories used in IS research wiki“. I’ll take this as my main clue of learning. OK, let start with two perspectives of firms.

Resource-based theory of the firm

from http://www.fsc.yorku.ca/york/istheory/wiki/index.php/Resource-based_view_of_the_firm

The resource-based view (RBV) argues that firms possess resources, a subset of which enable them to achieve competitive advantage, and a subset of those that lead to superior long-term performance. Resources that are valuable and rare can lead to the creation of competitive advantage. That advantage can be sustained over longer time periods to the extent that the firm is able to protect against resource imitation, transfer, or substitution. In general, empirical studies using the theory have strongly supported the resource-based view.

Diagram/schematic of RBV theory

Knowledge-based theory of the firm

from http://www.fsc.yorku.ca/york/istheory/wiki/index.php/Knowledge-based_theory_of_the_firm

The knowledge-based theory of the firm considers knowledge as the most strategically significant resource of the firm. Its proponents argue that because knowledge-based resources are usually difficult to imitate and socially complex, heterogeneous knowledge bases and capabilities among firms are the major determinants of sustained competitive advantage and superior corporate performance.

This knowledge is embedded and carried through multiple entities including organizational culture and identity, policies, routines, documents, systems, and employees. Originating from the strategic management literature, this perspective builds upon and extends the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) initially promoted by Penrose (1959) and later expanded by others (Wernerfelt 1984, Barney 1991, Conner 1991).

Although the resource-based view of the firm recognizes the important role of knowledge in firms that achieve a competitive advantage, proponents of the knowledge-based view argue that the resource-based perspective does not go far enough. Specifically, the RBV treats knowledge as a generic resource, rather than having special characteristics. It therefore does not distinguish between different types of knowledge-based capabilities. Information technologies can play an important role in the knowledge-based view of the firm in that information systems can be used to synthesize, enhance, and expedite large-scale intra- and inter-firm knowledge management (Alavi and Leidner 2001).

Cross-validation, sometimes called rotation estimation, is the statistical practice of partitioning a sample of data into subsets such that the analysis is initially performed on a single subset, while the other subset(s) are retained for subsequent use in confirming and validating the initial analysis.

Common Types:

Holdout validation

Repeated random sub-sampling validation

K-fold cross-validation

Leave-one-out cross-validation

http://isworld.org/csaunders/rankings.htm

And some links on that page seem helpful. For example, journal lists from UKY and OU prove valuable because their explanation of the reason why choosing these journals:

University of Kentucky List: http://isworld.org/csaunders/uky.htm

University of Oklahoma List: http://isworld.org/csaunders/ou.htm

Journal of Consumer Research      1.738

Information Systems Research       2.682

MIS Quarterly                                   5.826

Management Science                      1.931

Journal of Marketing Research       1.739

Journal of Marketing                        3.75

Marketing Science                            3.946

……

What shocked me mostly is that the low impact factors of "Management Science". So few people cited articles from this journal? Why it has such a high reputation in all these business schools?

I’ve found a similar one here after a bit of search. Not so bad, I guess.

It’s just an overview. Interactive advertising methods such as SMS ad and blog/user generated content ad (which I was interested in because of my own research falls in this title) were introduced. And the “opening a Kryptonite lock with a pen” example was impressive.

The most valuable knowledge given by Professor Taylor maybe the “Digital Ad. Principles”:

1.Privacy and SPIM issue
2.Trust
3.Interactivity
4.Entertainment
5.Building Brands

The structure of a research proposal:

• Introduction and objectives
• Literature and background
• Methodology
• Plans for data analysis
• Timescale and predicted results
• Where to publish

Other guidelines do not have the last one, “where to publish”. But I think it is good for me to begin with the end in my mind.

Some other tips:

• A telephone interview with 800-1000 respondents will cost about 46,000 HKD and almost a week time.

• Once you hire a research assistant, you should prepare to help him or her to start before he/she report duty. And you should keep a track on his/her work progress.

And there were also some discussion about the ongoing research project list or a internal magazine. I think it is a good idea for any other organizations besides a research department.