Smart Products
Introduction
Special issue of Electronic Markets, Edited by Wolfgang Maass and Upkar Varshney; Deadline 6 Jan 2008
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Call for Papers
for the focus theme section on
"Smart Products"
of Electronic Markets – The International Journal
Guest Editors of the focus theme section:
Wolfgang Maass (Furtwangen University, Germany),
Upkar Varshney (Georgia State University, USA).
The CfP is available Online at
Recent innovations in mobile and sensor technologies allow for creating a digital representation of almost any physical entity and its parameters over time at any place. RFID technologies and 2D barcodes, for instance, are used to ground digital representations, which are used to track and geo-reference physical entities. In general, physical worlds and digital representations become tightly interconnected, so that manipulations in either of these worlds would have effect on the other. The key question is: what does this mean for future kinds of products, services, and markets?
Smart Products can be defined as products and their digital representations that will enable "agentive" (that is, interactive and communicative) services that adapt to situations and consumers. Smart products require new kinds of product interfaces, and enable innovative economic concepts. Hence, the vision of Smart Products raises research questions on technical side, such as, which architectures are applicable, which kind of semantic representations and processing services are required, which services allow adaptation to consumer needs and which kind of telecommunication infrastructure will enable Smart Product communication in a secure and robust manner.
On the economic side questions arise, for instance, on the acceptance, efficiency and effectiveness of Smart Products similar to empirical investigations on online recommendation agents. Furthermore Smart Products are appealing for practitioners because they can become enabler of new business models and might provide infrastructures for innovative mobile marketing strategies.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Design of smart products
- Dynamic pricing models with smart products
- Mobile marketing models for smart products
- Ambient business
- Design of user-centered ambient computing
- Anthropomorphic objects
- Evaluation of ubiquitous computing applications
- Dynamic adaptation of products
- Product-centered Customer Relationship Management
- Product-centered Knowledge Management
- Semantic representations for smart products
- Infrastructure for smart products
- Application cases
Additional topic suggestions are welcome. All papers will be peer reviewed and should conform to Electronic Markets publication standards.
Methodological and theoretical pluralism (empirical or theoretical work, qualitative research, design science, prototypes …) is welcomed by the journal.
Abstracts must be sent to Electronic Markets prior to the submission deadline, preferably until November 2007. Full papers are invited to be submitted by 06. January 2008. All papers should be original, not published elsewhere.
If you would like to discuss any aspect of the focus theme section, please contact the Editor for the focus theme section.
Contact address: wolfgang.maass@hs-furtwangen.de
Final papers must be submitted to the Editorial Team: editors@electronicmarkets.org
Important deadlines:
Submission deadline: 06. January 2008
Acceptance decision: 28. March 2008
Issue: Vol. 18, No. 3, August 2008