The effects consumer-driven innovation can have on an industry can be difficult to quantify. In this thesis I seek to highlight their existence and underscore their influence by observing the historical impact of numerous innovations on modern technology and society. Using the photography industry as a case study, I will show how successful companies leverage consumers to increase profits and technological development. Companies unable or unwilling to adapt will struggle to maintain profits and become insignificant in the market place. It is also important to consider the enablement of customers by these manufacturers. Advancements in the primary industry as well as supporting industries can lead to variability in market growth and often stimulate societal changes. As consumer innovators progress towards production, it is increasingly important that manufacturers adapt and redefine their market presence. Consumers are a powerful force and represent more than financial capital. My research shows that creative companies can harness consumer energy and find opportunities in the intellectual capital of the crowd. / text

Dissertation (Ph.D)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by A.F. Salam; submitted to the School of Business & Economics. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 31, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-346).

Integration and unit testing is a critical part of most software development processes and, as such, demands for reliability, complexity of the tests as well as test execution time are important factors to consider when developing tests. This thesis explores the idea of designing and creating a testing framework based on the principles of testing by contract. It contains an example of how such a framework can be designed as well as a comparison between this design and traditional integration tests.

Mikrotjänstarkitektur är den senaste trenden inom mjukvaruutveckling som gör det möjligt att bygga komplexa system från mindre tjänster utformade för att vara självförsörjande och fokuserade på en specifik affärsfunktionalitet. Dessa kan utvecklas, testas, driftsättas och skalas oberoende av varandra, vilket gör att team kan vara mer autonoma och leverera värde till kunder snabbare. Bolagsverket är i processen att övergå till en arkitektur baserad på mikrotjänster men dess långa historia av omfattande end-to-end-tester som är komplexa att sätta upp, långsamma att köra och kräver mycket resurser gör det svårt att testa att integrationerna fortsätter att fungera efter att ändringar har införts. Contract testing underlättar denna verifiering. Studien implementerar Consumer-Driven förhållningssättet till tekniken med ramverken Pact och Spring Cloud Contract med syftet att undersöka hur integrationen mellan två tjänster som kommunicerar via ett REST API kan testas isolerat, samtidigt som man säkerställer att de kommer att fortsätta att interagera som förväntas när den faktiska integrationen testas. De kvantitativa och kvalitativa resultaten från fem semistrukturerade intervjuer visar att Bolagsverket i genomsnitt skulle kunna minska tiden det tar att leverera en funktion med 24 %, öka frekvensen av distribution med 42 % och minska infrastrukturkostnader med 52 %. Det här skulle göra det möjligt att ersätta end-to-end tester tidigt i utvecklingscykeln med kontraktstester och att ha en enda testmiljö med fullständiga integrationer innan driftsättning till produktion. Tekniken har emellertid vissa inneboende kostnader och garanterar i sig inte alla fördelar med en mikrotjänstarkitektur / Microservices architecture are the latest trend in software development enabling to build complex systems from smaller services designed to be self-sufficient and focused on a specific business functionality. These can be developed, tested, deployed, and scaled independently, allowing teams to be more autonomous and deliver value to customers faster. The Swedish Companies Registration Office, Bolagsverket, is in the process of transitioning toward a microservices architecture but its long history of extensive reliance on end-to-end tests that are complex to set up, slow to run, and require plenty of resources makes it difficult to test that the integrations continue to work after changes are introduced. Contract testing facilitates such verification. The study implements the Consumer-Driven approach to this technique with the frameworks Pact and Spring Cloud Contract with the objective of investigating how the integration between two services communicating via a REST API can be tested in isolation, while ensuring that they will continue to interact as expected when the actual integration is tested. The quantitative and qualitative results from five semi-structured interviews show that, on average, the agency could decrease the time it takes to deliver a feature by 24%, increase the deployment frequency by 42%, and reduce infrastructural expenses by 52%. This would allow to replace end-toend tests early in the development cycle with contract tests, and to have a sole test environment with complete integrations before deploying to production. However, the technique has some inherent costs and on its own does not guarantee all the benefits of a microservices architecture

As emerging market economies gain increasing influence and importance in the global economy, any development with a potentially destabilizing effect on the economic performance on such countries should be carefully monitored. This paper examines one particular development: the rise of consumer debt. Through the case studies of Turkey, China, and Brazil, this paper seeks to analyze the relationship between an increase in consumer debt and a country's GDP growth in emerging markets and how a detrimental relationship could severely impact the international economy at large.

In the past decade, there has been rampant growth in healthcare service delivery options, based on the Internet and related information and communication technology. As a result, there is a great deal of expectation among national governments, regulators, healthcare organisations, and other stakeholders about the role of the Internet in healthcare service provision. Given the global crisis in healthcare services generally and the funding of healthcare services specifically, a number of policymakers view the advances in Internet-based self-service technology as a potential enabler of more efficient and effective healthcare service delivery. Proponents of consumer-driven healthcare in particular who seek to use the Internet to make consumers more informed about healthcare funding decisions and to reduce the cost of servicing consumers have been actively experimenting in this area. Despite the accelerating growth in the deployment of Internet-based self-service technologies, their protracted uptake by users is giving rise to concerns about the effectiveness of the implementation and acceptance of these contemporary forms of service delivery. Furthermore, little is known about how the social healthcare context shapes Internet-based self-service technology implementations. This thesis presents an in-depth qualitative case study that documents a healthcare insurer’s efforts to implement an online self-service technology for the period 1999 to 2005. A research framework was adopted that draws on key theoretical concepts from structuration and actornetwork theory (ANT) to link the social context to implementation processes. These two conceptual lenses, which are compatible with the thesis’s interpretive stance, reveal several new insights, confirming that the challenges associated with the implementation of information system innovations such as Internet-based self-service technologies cannot be understood in isolation. From a structuration perspective analysing the various enactments of self-service provision of healthcare afforded a deeper understanding of how social practices influence the design and use of the technology. From an ANT perspective, the study showed how the major translations in the design and use of the self-service technology emerged from a process where technological and social elements co-evolved. This study also reveals that the implementation problems and opportunities facing this particular healthcare insurance organisation were historical and systemic. This approach demonstrates that the complex interdependencies and interactions among contrasting social, political, economic and technological issues shaped the contemporary channel as it exists today and therefore advances theory in yet another important way. Using the insights obtained from these two theories, a conceptual framework was derived. The conceptual framework demonstrates that in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of Internet-based self-service technology implementation, such an analysis must incorporate the interconnectedness of four perspectives – meaning, process, context and the technology artefact – and their respective conceptual elements from both structuration and actor-network theory. Future studies attempting to deepen our understanding of information systems implementation can also provide constructive insights by focusing on the interdependent, interconnected and historical nature of the implementation phenomenon. Some important practical applications for future self-service technology implementations are also discussed. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Informatics / unrestricted

Billions of mental health care dollars for millions of children and adolescents in need has garnered significant attention within the behavioral health industry to reduce costs while improving treatment efficacy through the identification and implementation of evidence based practices with youth populations requiring therapeutic services. This hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative research approach in the field of psychology is a consumer driven one in the world of business. Line by line context and discourse analyses, which included both a prior and inductive coding, of the verbiage and phraseology of 10 boys and 10 girls, aged 8-12, actively engaged in outpatient psychotherapy, formed the foundation for 31 themes that captured a shared experience or a consumer driven “view inside the therapist’s office.” These results are represented through 6 main themes indicating that a) “knowledge fosters investment” upon entry into and initiation of mental health services when therapists and parents recognize that b) “words have power to facilitate success,” only if, guided by childhood development but chosen thoughtfully for each child. Further, c) “therapy is therapy across the lifespan,” such that therapeutic care for minors deemed legally dependent reflected treatment for legally independent persons with implementation methods influenced by age. Lastly, age, as a definitive factor, impacted the means by which the youth in my study experienced d) “autonomy… and developed e) “therapeutic rapport…” in references to e) “boundaries…” that mitigate the entire treatment experience. The outcomes of this study offer the research and practice community opportunity to move children from the “object” of the treatment to “agents” in their treatment by respecting the ideas expressed by youth themselves.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon declared that the “spiraling costs” of medical care constituted a “crisis.” Medicare and Medicaid had been passed only four years previously, and had dramatically changed the way Americans accessed and paid for medical care. The ensuing three decades ushered in a renewed period of advocacy for health care reform with costs remaining a consistent focus. Proponents for national health insurance framed health as a human right emphasizing equitable access. Those advocating for private health insurance touted the power of the marketplace to contain costs through competition and freedom of choice. Throughout the debates, health reform advocates, insurance industry representatives, medical providers, and legislators repeatedly referred to the “health consumer” as the potential benefactor of such reforms. But this ubiquitous term remained ambiguous. Who exactly was the “health consumer”? The contests over the rhetoric of the health consumer as an identity, its uses and political alignments, were engaged through print, in research, in organized campaigns, and in discrete individual interactions with health insurance and the health care system. These interconnected systems of power informed and were informed by the language used to describe them, in the sense of “structuring structures,” extending to economics and the consumer movement, social movements and civil rights. Thus the ideological orientations of the terms of the debate, focused on the “health consumer,” have shifted often and have continued to be contested in a dialectic relationship. This analysis therefore takes place at those intersections where health consumers as individuals have confronted the private, for-profit sphere by making claims for health consumer rights. The utility and ethical implications of commodification versus rights language have consistently been at the center of these opposing views. This dissertation examines the evolution of the dialectic dynamic of these two approaches to better understand how health consumer rights advocates have confronted challenges to include their voices in health care debates from the 1970s to the late 1980s at the local, state, and national levels. Specific sites include the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and the Center for Public Representation, both located in Wisconsin, as well as the national grassroots organization Citizen Action and the local chapter Massachusetts Fair Share. Moving beyond binary understandings such as "patients" and "non-patients," or even the "patient/consumer," the health consumer identity blurs distinctions of inclusion and exclusion and dramatically expands the framing of "who counts" in health social movements. The health consumer thereby has remained a locus of contestation and potential rhetorical power that can inform the more political use of the term for making rights claims, as well as the more economic approach that advocates for free market principles. As such, it is readily co-opted in movement/counter-movement shifts in language and political alignment. Such contests and co-optation frame each chapter in this dissertation. Ultimately, health social movements and the dynamic, even equivocal orientation of the “health consumer” identity may play a determinative role in how to move forward with health care policy reform that seeks to provide all Americans with equitable access to wellness, rather than vying to purchase health.

This dissertation examines the effects of physician ownership of hospitals on the quality of patient-centric care in the U.S. The health care sector in the U.S. is becoming more aligned with markets and in turn, with consumers’ preferences. In consumer driven service industries, consumer satisfaction is considered a key criterion to judge quality. In the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) patient satisfaction surveys, physician-owned hospitals (POHs) get more top 5-Star ratings than other hospitals. However, it is not known whether higher perceived patient satisfaction is because of better inpatient experience or due to better health related outcomes. Ratings also do not clarify variations between specialty and general service POHs. The study compares the quality of care in POHs with that in other major forms of hospitals (corporate-owned, and not-for-profit). The Affordable Care Act (ACA) regulated physician ownership of hospitals due to concerns that physicians’ profit motive might negatively affect the quality of care. This non-experimental study used bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine variation in the quality of care among types of hospitals in 2017 and 2018 using patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes as indicators of quality. This study used two samples, a full and a restricted sample. Full sample compared all POHs (specialty and general service) with other hospitals. Restricted sample included only general service hospitals. Patients in POHs were found to have higher perceived satisfaction, and viewed providers’ practices more favorably in the full sample. In the restricted sample, however, not-for-profit (NFP) hospitals provided relatively better care. Corporate-owned hospitals had lowest patient satisfaction and poorest outcomes. Results indicate POHs are competitive with not-for-profit hospitals on patient satisfaction dimension of quality care. Multivariate analyses suggest that the effects of physician ownership go away when mediation by providers’ practices is considered. NFP hospitals, however, continue to provide better overall value of care. The results do not support reconsideration of the ACA restrictions on POHs. Patient satisfaction may be contingent upon patient-centric practices than type of hospital, but hospital ownership may affect preference for some practices over others. Outcomes may not matter when patients’ perceptions measure quality. / Ph. D. / The health care sector is becoming more closely linked to markets, and consumer experience and satisfaction, like any other consumer services industry due to growing influence of for-profit hospitals and hospital forms. Physician-owned hospitals are a relatively new form of hospitals in the U.S. Along with more traditional not-for-profit and corporate-owned hospitals; physician-owned hospitals compete for patients and patient dollars. Many physician-owned hospitals are specialty and surgical hospitals, in addition to general service hospitals. According to federal government surveys, patients usually perceive medical care provided by physician-owned hospitals to be of superior quality to that of other kinds of hospital. However, physician-owned hospitals are a type of for-profit hospital, and it is not clearly known if general service physician owned hospitals provide similar care as specialty hospitals. This research compared possible quality differences between specialty and general service physician-owned hospitals as well as with corporate-owned and not-for-profit hospitals. The results indicate that patients’ perceptions of quality of care are not consistent for physician-owned specialty and general service hospitals; the higher patient perception ratings for physician-owned hospitals reflect the better performance of specialty hospitals. In comparison with other hospitals, not-for-profit hospitals seem to provide better quality of care (tapped by both patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes) than for-profit hospitals. Corporate-owned hospitals were found to have lowest quality of care. Patients should consider tradeoffs between having better inpatient experiences and better outcomes of care.

Syfte: Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att öka förståelsen för hur samhällets och teknikens senaste utveckling har bidragit med nya marknadsföringskanaler och vad detta innebär för företags marknadsföringsstrategier. Med detta syfte som utgångspunkt har tre forskningsfrågor formulerats för att avgränsa forskningen än mer: Hur kan smartphones som marknadsföringskanal hjälpa företag att precisera sin marknadsföring till kunden? På vilket sätt har den nya mobila tekniken, i form av smartphones, påverkat företags segmenteringsmöjligheter? Hur kan ett företag använda sig av smartphones, som ett verktyg för att hantera kundrelationer? Metod: Uppsatsen är resultatet av en kvalitativ studie med en huvudsaklig induktiv inriktning. Primärdatainsamlingen har skett genom kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer. Slutsats: Efter att ha undersökt detta ämne har vi dragit slutsatsen att valet av smartphones som kanal kan hjälpa företag att precisera sin marknadsföring genom att telefonen är tillgänglig och personlig för kunden. Därför menar vi att kunders integritet och acceptans kommer att vara avgörande faktorer och viktiga att beakta. Timing är en väsentlig del av precisionsmarknadsföringen och vi har därför presenterat två nya begrepp; företagsstyrd timing och kundstyrd timing. Smartphones har även bidragit med nya möjligheter för företag att segmentera marknaden där vi framhållit slutsatsen att plats och kontext torde vara nya segmenteringsvariabler för företag att beakta. Vår slutsats är även att smartphones är en fördelaktig kanal när det kommer till byggande och hantering av kundrelationer och vi har sett tendenser till att kunden umgås med varumärket på ett sätt som tidigare inte varit möjligt. Vi introducerar ett nytt begrepp, interaktionsintensiva kommunikationsenheter, där smartphones ses som den ledande enhetstypen idag. Nyckelord: Mobilmarknadsföring, smartphones, precisionsmarknadsföring, kundstyrd timing[1], segmentering, kontext, relevans, integritet, kundrelationer, interaktionsintensiva kommunikationsenheter[2] [1]Begreppet är av oss introducerat och utgör en del av en egengjord modell. Se s 58, kapitel 5.1.1 [2]Vi har valt att introducera detta begrepp som ett samlingsnamn för en ny typ av marknadsföringskanal. Se s. 63, kapitel 5.1.3 / Purpose: The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of how the development of the society, as well as the technology, has increased the numbers of marketing channels and how they affect companies’ marketing strategies. In order to investigate this subject we have formulated three main questions: How can smartphones as a marketing channel help companies pinpoint their communication to the customer? How do smartphones affect companies' ability to segment the market? How can a company use smartphones, as a tool to manage customer relationships? Approach: We have done a qualitative study with an inductive approach. Primary data has been collected through seven qualitative semi-structured interviews with persons from different companies. Conclusions: After investigating this subject we have come to the conclusion that using smartphones as a marketing channel can help companies to pinpoint their marketing because of the device’s availability and because that the phone is personal to the customer. We mean that customers’ acceptance and integrity is very important to take into consideration and will be of great importance in how well companies will succeed in its use of smartphones as a marketing channel. Timing is another important question and we have therefore presented two new concepts; business-driven timing and customer-driven timing. Smartphones has also contributed with new strategies when it comes to market segmentation. We suggest place and context as new market segmentation variables so that companies could be able to find their customer in right place and in right time. We have also come to the conclusion that smartphones as a marketing channel is advantageous when it comes to building relationship to the customer and we have also seen tendencies that the customer socialize with the brand in a way that they has not been done before. We have also introduced a new concept, interactive communication devices, which is a name for a new type of marketing channels and where smartphones is the leading device today. Keywords: Mobile marketing, precision marketing, customer driven timing[3], market segmentation, context, relevance, integrity, brand, customer relationship, high interactive communication devices[4] [3]This is a new concept that we have introduced and is a part of a model that we have created. See page 58, chapter 5.1.1 [4]This is a new concept that we have introduced and is a concept for a new type of marketing channel, see page 63, chapter 5.1.3.