On Internal Knowledge Markets

In large organizations, knowledge can move rapidly or slowly, usefully or unproductively. Those who place faith in internal knowledge markets and online platforms to promote knowledge stocks and flows should understand how extrinsic incentives can crowd outintrinsic motivation

Competing in the Digital Economy?: The Dynamics and Impacts of B2B E-commerce on the South African Manufacturing Sector

ICTs, B2B e-commerce, manufacturing sector, South Africa

From e-trash to e-treasure: how value can be created by the new e-business models for reverse logistics

Reverse logistics, that is, all operations related to the reuse of used products, excess inventory and packaging materials, gain increasing attention globally both for their promising financial potentials, the sustainable growth alternative they offer and the environmental positive impact they have. In this paper, we introduce reverse logistics and we explain how the adoption of e-commerce provides new possibilities to existing business models and what are the new e-business models in reverse logistics that have emerged. We compare these three new e-business models, namely, returns aggregators, specialty locators and integrated solution providers on a number of aspects and identify keys for their competitive advantage. Finally, we discuss conceptual and actual opportunities for these e-business models to thrive and advance and present some e-commerce tools that are being developed with the aim to address the distributed, dynamic and knowledge-intensive aspects of applications that contribute to the advancement of e-businesses in the field of reverse logistics.e-commerce;Reverse logistics;e-business models

e-Factors in e-Agribusiness

The Internet offers new opportunities for small businesses to conquer new markets and to find better and cheaper suppliers. Internet-based commerce is widely perceived as the new business logic that operates in a world without boundaries; a world characterized by speed, change, interactivity and connectivity. In this global commercial environment, e-business models appear to be the central conceptual component. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the way in which companies trade with their suppliers and customers. The growing complexity of the food sector drives companies to adopt more sophisticated and effective e-business solutions. If we intend to adopt an e-business solution we have to consider more “e-factors” such as technological, individual, organizational, industrial and societal aspects

Differentiated duopoly under vertical relationships with communication costs

Platform sharing across manufacturers has recently become common practice in the automobile industry. Its important objective is to reduce procurement costs by taking advantage of the commonality of components, but this often reduces the degree of product differentiation. We investigate this trade-off through analyzing a model that incorporates manufacturer-supplier relationships with communication costs into a standard differentiated duopoly model, and find an interesting inverse relationship between the advantage of platform sharing and the costs for manufacturers to communicate with their potential suppliers. The result suggests that the information-technology revolution could be a reason for the recent prevalence of platform sharing in the automobile industry, and predicts that similar phenomena would prevail in various other industries as the IT revolution makes further progress. We then consider an extension of our model that incorporates an option for the manufacturers to jointly establish a B2B electronic marketplace in order to reduce their communication costs, and explore its welfare implications. Although the joint establishment of an e-marketplace could be viewed as an anticompetitive activity, we find that in our framework it increases welfare.Communication cost, differentiated duopoly, electronic commerce, electronic marketplace, manufacturer-supplier relationships, platform sharing, product differentiation

Interorganizational Knowledge Management Systems: Typology and Cases

Although companies are more and more developing complex networks of connections with their partners and customers and shifting their focus towards expanding the knowledge management concept externally, research addressing the management of knowledge across organizational borders is rather sparse. Our aim in the present paper is to develop a typology of cross-organizational networks of information and knowledge flows. In order to arrive at such a typology we examine two issues. The first concerns the locus of control on the processes that enable knowledge flow. The second refers to the tradability of the streams of knowledge that flow among organizational entities. We examine four types of knowledge networks: open knowledge networks, private knowledge networks, closed knowledge exchanges and knowledge markets. For each type of knowledge network, we examine its distinct characteristics, study related examples, consider the associated research challenges and analyse an indicative case

International Examples of Large-Scale Systems - Theory and Practice III: Competition and Strategy in Electronic Marketplaces

Electronic marketplaces are evolving in both business to business, and business to consumer contexts. Although the initial hype surrounding all types of marketplaces appears to overstate their short-term impact, established companies across all types of industrial sectors are entering into collaborative, industry-wide initiatives to agree on common technical and trading standards to improve the effectiveness of the interactions between buyers and sellers on a global scale. An overview of contemporary developments is presented, and common patterns across different sectors are identified. Three case studies are presented in the areas of automotive, banking, and consumer markets. It is shown that product-market characteristics affect the formation of business relationships and market structures, and the design of information flows and shared systems is a reflection of typically strong business relationships and hierarchical market structures