How the leading Chinese real estate brokerage transformed into a digital platform business

Purpose In this article, we study how a Chinese real estate broker - Lianjia successfully transformed itself into Beike - China’s leading digital platform for housing transactions and services. We explain the motivation behind this platform transformation, how it turned out, and what are the lessons learned for other companies contemplating a platform transformation. Beike’s lessons are significant as they not only can help the companies achieve growth via platform transformation but also create social value by contributing to higher service quality in traditional service industries. Design/methodology/approach We draw upon comprehensive archival research into Beike, and our many years of ongoing research on platform strategy and business growth strategy. Findings This article provides important lessons for companies in traditional service industries on how to expand growth via digital platforms. We summarize four key lessons learned: 1) data is central to success in platform transformation; 2) industry knowledge and experience play an important role; 3) the right platform governance is critical in value creation; 4) harness the double powers of platform and digital transformation. Research limitations/implications More research on digital platforms and platform transformation in traditional service industries is needed to delve into the underlying factors and delineate the boundary conditions for specific details in this strategy and implementation. Practical implications This article is useful to business executives, academics, management consultants, and entrepreneurs interested in learning more about how to use digital platforms to achieve business growth and create economic and social value. In particular, Beike’s case offers inspiration and valuable lessons to companies in traditional service industries and helps them consider the factors that are important in the process of platform transformation. Social Implications This article on Beike provides an innovative solution to business leaders in traditional service industries grappling with a lack of professional standards and trust to use digital platforms to elevate service quality and create social value. Originality/value This article is unique and add value because Beike is a pioneer of using the digital platform to achieve growth and transform traditional service industries. Our study shows that platform transformation not only can help a company in a traditional industry achieve impressive growth but at the same time can create enormous social value by elevating the service quality of the whole industry.

Family Caregiver Needs and Preferences for Virtual Training to Manage Behavioral Symptoms of Dementia

STAR-Caregivers Virtual Training and Follow-up (STAR-VTF) is adapted from an evidence-based, in-person program that teaches family caregivers to manage behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). The study objective was to understand the needs of family caregivers for improving BPSD management and the extent to which caregivers perceived that STAR-VTF could address those needs. We conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with family caregivers of people with dementia. We showed caregivers prototypes of STAR-VTF online self-directed materials. We obtained caregiver feedback, focusing on needs and preferences and perceived barriers to using STAR-VTF. We used a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and aggregated codes to develop themes. The idea of a virtual training program for learning to manage BPSD appealed to caregivers. They said healthcare providers did not provide adequate education in the early disease stages about the personality and behavior symptoms that can affect people with dementia. Caregivers found it unexpected and frustrating when the person with dementia began experiencing BPSD, symptoms they felt unprepared to manage. Accordingly, caregivers expressed a strong desire for the healthcare organization to offer programs such as STAR-VTF much sooner. Many were interested in the virtual aspect of the training due to the convenience of receiving help from home and the perception that help from a virtual program would be timelier than traditional service modalities. Given caregivers’ limited time, they suggested dividing the STAR-VTF content into chunks to review as time permitted. Caregivers reported a preference for having the same coach for the program duration.

Digital Technology for Remote Hearing Assessment—Current Status and Future Directions for Consumers

Globally, more than 1.5 billion people have hearing loss. Unfortunately, most people with hearing loss reside in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where traditional face-to-face services rendered by trained health professionals are few and unequally dispersed. The COVID-19 pandemic has further hampered the effectiveness of traditional service delivery models to provide hearing care. Digital health technologies are strong enablers of hearing care and can support health delivery models that are more sustainable. The convergence of advancing technology and mobile connectivity is enabling new ways of providing decentralized hearing services. Recently, an abundance of digital applications that offer hearing tests directly to the public has become available. A growing body of evidence has shown the ability of several approaches to provide accurate, accessible, and remote hearing assessment to consumers. Further effort is needed to promote greater accuracy across a variety of test platforms, improve sensitivity to ear disease, and scale up hearing rehabilitation, especially in LMICs.

Why telehealth does not always save money for the health system

PurposeThis study aims to determine elements of telehealth that have the potential to increase costs for the health system in the short to medium term.Design/methodology/approachA search of PubMed, EMBASE and Scopus databases was performed in May 2018 using broad terms for telehealth and economics. Articles were included if they identified and explained reasons for an increase in cost for telehealth services. Studies were categorised by economic analysis type for data extraction and descriptive synthesis.FindingsFourteen studies met inclusion criteria and were included in the review. These studies identified that increased health system costs were due to implementation costs (e.g. for equipment, software or staff training), increased use of other healthcare services (e.g. pharmaceutical services) and ongoing service costs (including staff salaries) resulting from telehealth being additive to traditional service (e.g. increased frequency of contact).Originality/valueTelehealth is often assumed to be a cost-effective method of delivering healthcare, even to the point where direct cost savings are expected by decision makers as a result of implementation. However, this investigation suggests it does not routinely reduce costs for the health system and can actually increase costs at both implementation and ongoing service delivery stages. Health services considering implementing telehealth should be motivated by benefits other than cost reduction such as improved accessibility, greater patient centricity and societal cost–benefit.

Barriers for Entering the Digital World: Exploring Customer Value Co-destruction in Self-Service Technologies

The value co-creation scholarly work has been criticized for neglecting the possible failures in the collaborative value creation process, which is termed as ‘value co-destruction’. Additionally, both the value co-creation and available limited research work in value co-destruction have overly attended on actor-to-actor interactions taking place in traditional service encounters, disregarding the practical movement towards the provision of services via technological platforms. Though there are ample studies that recognize factors influencing customer acceptance or rejections of technologies, a very limited number of studies have focused on exploring how and why customer collaboration with self-service technologies (SSTs) goes wrong due to the failures in the co-creation process. Therefore, this study attempts to understand how ‘value co-destruction’ takes place in the SSTs. Following a qualitative inquiry, using semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals, 15 reasons for co-destruction that vary among different customer demographics were found and classified into four integrative themes as ‘inabilities in co-learning’, ‘poor co-operation’, ‘problems with connecting’ and ‘poor corrective actions’. The findings fill the gap in the literature by addressing value co-destruction in technological interfaces, particularly in the SST context. Further, it will help practitioners to design and deliver value-enhancing self-service technological interfaces, resulting in none or minimum difficulties for customers.

A Testbed for QOS-Based Data Analytic Service Selection in the Cloud

With the emergence of Big Data and Cloud Computing, more and more data analytic software services have become available through a Cloud platform. Compared to the traditional service selection problem, selecting this type of services has additional challenges, which requires new selection models being proposed. It is the purpose of this work to “create a testbed” to benefit the research community in this area so that different selection models with consideration of different performance-influencing factors such as algorithms implemented, datasets to be processed, hosting infrastructure, can be tested and compared. We created a cloud-based platform for publishing and invoking analytic services as well as monitoring service performance during invocation. We implemented various data mining algorithms from different packages as example analytic services and hosted them on different infrastructure services. We also ran these services on some real datasets to collect a sample dataset of their Quality of Service (QoS) values.

A Testbed for QOS-Based Data Analytic Service Selection in the Cloud

With the emergence of Big Data and Cloud Computing, more and more data analytic software services have become available through a Cloud platform. Compared to the traditional service selection problem, selecting this type of services has additional challenges, which requires new selection models being proposed. It is the purpose of this work to “create a testbed” to benefit the research community in this area so that different selection models with consideration of different performance-influencing factors such as algorithms implemented, datasets to be processed, hosting infrastructure, can be tested and compared. We created a cloud-based platform for publishing and invoking analytic services as well as monitoring service performance during invocation. We implemented various data mining algorithms from different packages as example analytic services and hosted them on different infrastructure services. We also ran these services on some real datasets to collect a sample dataset of their Quality of Service (QoS) values.

The Traditional Ranks in the Petrine Epoch: Between Afterlife and Innovation

The ranks and awards of Russian service elites and nobility have been a historiographical issue since the eighteenth century. G. F. Miller reflected on the psychology of the Tsar’s subjects, who asked Peter the Great to keep some of the old ranks during the introduction of new ones and described two such cases. Soviet historians of the 1980s discovered several appointments to the old ranks made in the early eighteenth century and registered in archival documents. These curious cases were interpreted by researchers as isolated exceptions or the result of the inertia of old practices. The study of mass historical sources has since led to the discovery of more than 1100 cases of this kind and provided different contexts in which these awards were granted. It was previously thought that Tsar Peter ridiculed the old ranks, giving them only to his jesters. Modern research on Peter’s innovations leads to a different view. For example, the introduction of the Hungarian dress and beard shaving was carried out in several steps, with backtracking. There has also been some oversimplification of the comparative pairs of epithets, such as “Muscovite-Imperial”, “old-new”, “ and “boyars-nobility”, which reflects nothing but the didactic attitudes of historians themselves. This article demonstrates that there was no dearth of official awards or withdrawal of the Duma ranks until the 1710s, at least. The introduction of The Table of Ranks did not abolish the ranks of “courtiers” (tsaredvortsy), as the earlier Muscovite ranks were called, which became the basis of the nobility. Peter I introduced several innovations to the traditional service hierarchy. Before the beginning of the Great Northern War, hundreds of the Tsarina’s stol’niki and court servitors were transferred to the Muscovite ranks, following which the Zhiletsky List continued being replenished for some years afterwards. The drama of ranks was aggravated by the enhanced status of the regular army ranks, which were outside the Moskovsky Spisok (the hierarchy of traditional ranks). The course of events was accelerated by the Tsar’s intention to implement European analogues of court and civil titles. Nevertheless, the popularity of the traditional ranks outside the army remained high. According to many sources, the traditional ranks of Muscovy were kept in check and re-registered throughout Peter’s reign. The Tsar’s decrees raised the status of military service. He sometimes approved petitions for the Duma ranks by several of his subjects and had his unique way of indicating the prospects for advancement to other petitioners. The low-level Muscovite ranks within the traditional hierarchy proved to be more stable than previously assumed. Muscovite ranks were not included in The Table of Ranks because the only rank of mass appointments by the early 1720s was that of a d’iak.

Collaborative economy in the tourism industry The new deal for consumers in the European Union

Europe is the most touristic continent in the world, receiving more than 50% of all international tourists (Santolli, 2017) according to the World Tourism Organization. People from all over the world want to go to the most famous tourist attractions in Europe and what once seemed a distant dream to international tourists due to the high prices of hotels and air tickets, is now possible thanks to the competitive prices of international airlines such as Ryanair, Vueling and EasyJet (O’Connell & Williams , 2005) and the alternative to traditional accommodation providers: collaborative economy platforms such as Airbnb, HomeAway or Wimdu. This short research paper will be focused on this type of platform, which provide mainly hosting services, and the legal aspects of their terms and conditions of service. The collaborative economy in the tourism industry is a growing business model, which allows consumers around the world to rent a spare room, an entire house or an apartment, for a short period of time, at a lower price than the accommodation offered by the traditional service providers such as hotels. However, this phenomenon was not born as a trending idea or an alternative way of getting an extra income, but of the pure necessity of generating cash in a period when the economy was stagnating, and the owners of properties needed to be creative with the available resources. The collaborative economy is characterized by generating economic benefit (Botsman & Rogers , 2010) from assets that would otherwise be given little or no use by their owners or holders. However, the concept of ‘resources’ covers much more than just assets, since resources can refer to spaces, skills and any kind of goods, which, if not made available to the collaborative economy, would be largely unused.

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

Service-learning is a widely adopted educational pedagogy and philosophy. With the support from the Wharf (Holdings) Limited (Group), service-learning was conducted in the “Project WeCan” in Hong Kong. Prior to COVID-19, traditional service-learning was implemented with students learning in the classroom and applying their knowledge and skills to the community through providing direct face-to-face service. With the COVID-19 outbreak in the 2019–20 academic year, school lockdown measures appeared. Students had to learn online and to design and implement service offsite. As the impacts of this rapid shift in paradigm remain unknown, this study examined changes in university students using a pretest–posttest design (n = 124) and perceptions of service-learning experience via the subjective outcome evaluation design (n = 192) under COVID-19. The authors also investigated service recipients’ (n = 56) satisfaction with service activities they participated in during the pandemic. Both objective outcome evaluation and subjective outcome evaluation findings revealed that service providers (university students) and recipients (secondary school students) experienced benefits from the Project. Findings support the benefits of online service-learning in “Project WeCan” even during unprecedented times such as COVID-19.