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How ESL Devices Transform into Connected Label Solutions: A Perspective of Actor Interaction and
Information Rebundling

contains three steps: elicitation, reduction, and finding interpretations. First, we collect data
from a comprehensive industry review of retail digital transformation trends. We search
through the Internet by using keywords: “retail ecosystem,” “digital retail transformation,”
“ESL in retail,” and “cloud-based ESL.” In addition, we set the region/country option to

“all” to provide a comprehensive worldwide trend of this ESL technology implementation.
By conducting an extensive industry review of the ESL and retail industry, we understand
the industry context, such as technology, customer needs, value chain, and key actors

in developing and deploying ESL technology. To begin our data analysis, we identify
and categorize different actors according to each role, with a specific definition. Table 1
categorizes the actors.
Table 1 shows our category for each actor involved in the ESL-driven digital retail
transformation. We classify them according to their roles during the implementation and

development of ESL for the retail ecosystem. Since it is possible to place technological
artifacts within this socio-technical interaction, we also identify those involved in digital
transformation.

Following actor identification, authors sort events based on the timeline and code
them to gain a greater understanding of each happening. Then, each author reads the
data sources and meets regularly with the others for author triangulation. We remove 19
unrelated articles from our data sources, since they provide no relevant information about
ESL. Our final dataset comprises 88 rich articles offering insight into how ESL can enable

digital transformation in the retail ecosystem and the consequences at the organizational
and ecosystem levels. Our dataset can be considered a transparent representation of
how corporate operations and decision-making processes are created. We analyze our

dataset by applying a coding process, identifying actors and mechanisms for this digital
transformation, and ordering findings according to the timeline. Figure 4 presents our
coding scheme.
Lastly, we did another triangulation of our findings to confirm the reliability of the
results for this study.

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