26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Various social issues, which include unemployment, homelessness and skill shortages, exist in especially developing country contexts. In the same environment as the social issues, there are often resources (physical and non-physical) available that are not utilised to their full capacity. Theoretically certain idle resources could potentially be applied in different ways in order to address a social issue but also to benefit the owner economically. In order to achieve above objective, the possible role and contribution of employing engineers and in particular industrial engineers in addressing social problems and designing efficient and effective social services delivery systems hold exciting prospects. The aim of this paper therefore is to develop a decision support tool and process that makes use of core industrial engineering tools to investigate how idle resources in a community may be redeployed and utilised best to develop a sustainable and profitable social enterprise. The sharing economy is a principle that optimize the utilization of resources. The resources are shared when it is not fully utilized by the original owner and usually one party of the partnership would not be able to afford the resource. This principle can take on many forms for example sharing of physical assets, knowledge or even skills or information. The methodology of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is used to develop a decision support system framework and tool. A social issue within a community is identified and possible alternatives for business models to address the issue are generated and investigated, given the idle resource(s) available in the same community. A filtering process define the alternatives to three possible concepts and a business model analysis is created for each. With the necessary economic parameters and potential social value each enterprise will contribute to the community, the necessary trade-offs and comparisons can be made. The risks involved in each enterprise are taken in account and the champion of the project can make informed decisions regarding which concept to execute. The model is built to be generic and flexible in order to be applied in any environment where different resources are available to utilize. The paper present the validation of the model and its application to a case study of an idle resource in the form of a house in a rural context.