Divinus Oppong-Tawiah

Faced with growing pressures to become more environmentally sustainable, many companies are exploring innovative ways to incorporate “green” practices into their business processes. We focus on employees and their pro-environmental behaviours in the workplace. Drawing on gamification and persuasive design principles, we utilized five design cycles to develop and test a system that tracks employees’ electricity usage on their computer-related equipment, engages them through a mobile application using a garden metaphor, and encourages them to reduce their energy consumption. The results of the design cycles built on each other, demonstrating that the system decreases employees’ electricity consumption and increases their motivation to continue engaging in pro-environmental behaviours. Possible extensions to the system were also explored. Reflecting on our experiences, seven guidelines emerged related to gamification design and the wider field of design science research. Limitations and future research directions for gamification and environmental sustainability research are discussed.

Faced with growing pressures to be more environmentally sustainable, many companies are increasingly exploring innovative ways to incorporate “green” practices into their business processes. We focus on employees and their potential contributions to organization-wide sustainability goals through their pro-environmental behaviours. This article reports on current progress with a multi-year study targeting the use of mobile media to encourage pro-environmental behaviours. To do so, we provide employees with feedback on their computer-based energy usage. We discuss our combined design science and experimental approach to developing and studying a mobile application with embedded persuasive characteristics. Our future interventions will use this persuasive media platform to examine the impact of social-psychological theories on encouraging more sustainable energy use by employees.

Despite continuing interest in the role of university incubators in fostering IT entrepreneurship, empirical evidence on the link between incubation and IT startup survival has been mixed. This paper offers a fresh, unifying perspective by examining how university startups’ IT-enabled agility relates to their survival. We use the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities and new product development (NPD) literatures to create a conceptual framework of the impact of startup firms’ knowledge assets, technology capabilities, agility and innovation on their survival. Our framework suggests that startups’ survival rates increase when they use dynamic IT knowledge capabilities to pursue innovations with emerging technology capabilities in rapidly evolving IT markets. Implications for university incubator research, policy and management are discussed.