Raffaele Giaffreda Research Interests

The current telecommunication and ICT services world is characterised by a clear distinction between users / subcribers and the entities providing them with services. So we have from one side Telco operators and Internet services while from the other there are “locked-in” end-users. Very simply put, monetisation in such service provision context is clearly relying upon either ownership of subscribers (i.e. paying monthly fees for access and service bundles) or substained by the so called “network effect” of Web 2.0 services, which creates streams of click-based revenues. To complete the picture, we then have niche markets where specific communities’ needs in terms of ICT services are met by specific ad-hoc solutions individually tailored to meet those requirements.

A marked shift towards open services and a gradual change in the “end-users mix” where proactiveness is becoming more the rule than the exception is undermining the above illustrated status-quo and the associated business models. There is a need to promote service innovation through open multisided platforms that provide both, technically composable components as well as dynamic means for performance monitoring and compensation.

This is the wider background behind my research interests. I am therefore interested in studying solutions that not only fulfill end-users needs and foster prosumerism but can also bring sustainable revenues to the stakeholders investing resources in the platforms that instantiate those solutions.