Design and Development of a Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Service for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

The leitmotif of the presented research is the potential of EVs to contribute to a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation. I started the thesis by identifying the problem of the lack of a scalable solution for an EV-charging infrastructure against the backdrop of the German government’s ambitious goal to have a million EVs on the roads by the end of 2020. While the problem is gaining magnitude as the ratio of EVs per charging station grows (Nationale Plattform Elektromobilität, 2014), the last decade has seen the rise of sharing economy businesses, in which privately owned resources are channeled into P2P SCC platforms. This type of business allows physical resources to be shared between peer-users and peer-providers via an online platform. Enterprises in the sharing economy have demonstrated a high level of scalability and have extensively disrupted conventional value chains (Owyang, Tran, and Silva, 2013; Owyang, 2015). The high level of impact on practice that successful IT innovations in this area have achieved has drawn the attention of the IS discipline, especially its European branch, and research continues to call for the creation of innovative IT artifacts that, in addition to generating academic knowledge, can create a practical impact (Bichler, Heinzl, and Aalst, 2015). Against the background, this thesis presents the design of a scalable P2P SCC service for an EV-charging that can hasten the development of the EV-charging infrastructure.