Research seminar | Applying echeloned design science methodology in practice: Developing design principles for a coopetitive news platform FiNN+  - 14 May 2025

Abstract:Newspapers’ digital transformation offers various opportunities and challenges for publishers. While some publishers, such as The New York Times, have been able to monetize their online content, many publishers struggle to sustain revenues. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, we propose that a coopetitive news platform co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news could resolve this problem. However, we lack theoretically grounded design knowledge for designing such a coopetitive news platform. We conducted a five-year echeloned design science research (eDSR) project to address this gap. Through 16 design echelons, we developed a news platform prototype and produced design knowledge for developing it. Our findings offer proof of concept and proof of value for the proposed artefact from users’ and online news publishers’ perspectives. Our contributions to the literature and practice are several. The developed design principles offer a conceptual foundation for designing a coopetitive digital platform with a simplified onboarding process for new payingsubscribers that loosely couples platform proxies, enabling them to form a coopetition alliance. This, in turn, creates novel opportunities for bundling and cross-selling content from various coopeting publishers via novel subscription and pricing plans for digital subscriptions using micropayments.

 

 

About Tuure Tuunanen

Tuure Tuunanen is a Professor of Information Systems in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä. He leads the Value Creation for Cyber-Physical Systems and Services Research Group and Finnish Hub for Digitalization. He is also a research fellow of the Center for Service Leadership at Arizona State University, House of Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics, and European Research Center for Information Systems at University of Münster. He holds M.Sc. and D.Sc. (Econ.) degrees from the Aalto University School of Business. Dr. Tuunanen’s research is at the cross-sections of information systems, software engineering, marketing, and service science, and he is keenly interested in multi-disciplinary research in service innovation, design, and development.  His prior research has focused on requirements engineering, information systems development, and risk management. He also does research on design science research methodologies and theory development. His current research interests lie in the area of digital innovation and cyber-physical services. He is an associate editor for Communication of the Association for Information Systems (department of digital design) and Journal of Service Research and a senior editor for European Journal of Information Systems and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He is also an editorial board member of Information Systems Research.