It has been a long tradition that patients interact via discussion forums in virtual patient communities (VPCs) to share experiences and information. Nowadays, patients are beginning to develop ideas for innovative products and services within these communication forums. However, ideation in communication forums leads to poorly conceived and not well elaborated ideas, since these forums are primarily designed to support communication behaviors of many-to-many and not to support mass ideation interactions. Against this backdrop, the aim of this research is to enrich VPCs with a Web-based Ideation Platform (WBIP). We show that ideation outcome improves by means of a WBIP in VPCs due to the WBIP's inherent semantic representation of ideation processes. This paper describes the theory-ingrained design as well as the piloting and evaluation of this IT artifact, namely the WBIP. The findings of this action design research show that idea quality rises significantly with the help of a WBIP.

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More and more firms make use of virtual communities to interact with customers, particularly in the light of open innovation. Although companies invest enormous effort in developing virtual communities just a minority of these succeed. That means that firms were either unable to recruit the critical mass of users or to motivate users to publish and discuss generated content on the platform. Looking at the literature there are several models explaining the systematic development of virtual communities. Nevertheless, there is a lack in terms of the establishment of communities. Thus, we aim at taking a closer look at a few success stories in this field. We conducted several qualitative expert interviews with platform developers of these examples. The results show that the interviewed experts use a generic approach, which is based on practical experiences. Using these insights platform developers can design a more systematic approach to establish communities.

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The expenditures for inspection and maintenance of gas turbines are an important part of the total owning and operating costs. Maintenance outage time should be kept to a minimum. A proper design with adequate ports facilitates visual and boroscope inspection of critical areas. Maintenance outage time can be con• siderably reduced by special equipment which allows inspection and replacement of bearings and combustor inner parts and balancing of rotors without major disassembly of the unit. The advantages of an indoor installation with overhead crane with respect to maintenance are also discussed in this paper.