Web 2.0: Capabilities, Business Value and Strategic Practice

Web 2.0 is the adoption of open technologies and architectural frameworks to facilitate participative computing. Web 2.0 has the potential to deliver rich peer-to-peer interactions among users, enable collaborative value creation across business partners and create dynamic new services and business models. With the emergence of new information technology it is necessary for organizations to redefine and reassess the new technology and its business value. Extant research does not provide managers guidance on how they can utilize their web 2.0 presence to add value creating activities for the organization. In this research we develop a conceptual foundation for the value propositions enabled by web 2.0 technologies. We provide taxonomy of features, capabilities and organizational value added activities. We develop a model of Web 2.0 capabilities and the nature of value adding services they can provide

NUOVI MODELLI COLLABORATIVI DI IMPRESA: NASCITA E TRASFORMAZIONE DELL'ENTERPRISE 2.0

Today new approach to competition and new business models based on collaboration, sharing and openness and far from hierarchical control and vertical processes, seems to rise in some firms, known as Enterprise 2.0 This work explores the meaning of the acronym 2.0, synonymous of collaboration and sharing within open communities of individuals and firms, linked to the concept of enterprise. We try to define and explore a new way to create value: a new collaborative model lead by knowledge, web 2.0 technologies, complex network and people. Through these dimensions rises and develops Enterprise 2.0. The large availability of information and the opportunity for consumers, partner and professionals to share and co-create ideas, products and experiences, in fact, are questioning the effectiveness of traditional hierarchical strategy. Consumers are ever more empowered with the right to participate and take an active lead in the process of value creation. Therefore, companies are required to change their role in the all business processes. Firms are becoming even more open to share and collaborate, using the power of network and technologies web 2.0, rising the so called Enterprise 2.0. In this way, the goals are twofold: - on one hand to understand and to describe how this new enterprise model rises and evolves, through a predictive model based on theory building from cases. - on the other hand to explain if it is an evolution of the traditional business models, or a new, discontinuous innovation. To achieve these objectives we focus on the analysis of three case studies. Slow Food investigate the branding process, Ecars-Now! the innovation process and Fiat Mio the open design process. All these cases helped us to find some common elements and to define a common line guide for emerging and consolidation of Enterprise 2.0. Our major findings affect to the element responsible for the rise of these new organizational models that are: knowledge and intellectual capital, as the main source of competitive advantage and the most strategic resource of the firm that give effectiveness to the model; complex network, that allow knowledge and information sharing not otherwise available and offer sustainability to the model; web 2.0 technologies, that give efficiency to the model because reduce information and transaction costs; and people, because participate actively to the value creation process. Moreover, analyzing the case studies, emerge some common elements required for the consolidation of such models. We summarize them in: active participation, variety and diversity of the actors who participate, collaboration in goods production, collective leadership and auto-generating process. Finally, we consider the new Enterprise 2.0 just a traditional knowledge-based enterprise, which identifies in the new technologies (web 2.0) opportunities an alternative way to compete. This alternative models are not a discontinuous innovation, but just an evolution of traditional knowledge-based models with a much more high potential of collaboration

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large - network of people in the form of an open call.”Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of a start-up: Crowdspirit. The company's concept is based on the outsourcing of the entire R&D process to a community of designers and users, in the domain of consumer electronics. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration mainly to help the company design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present four main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) The emergence of the Crowdspirit business model; (2) The value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3) The challenging of the company's initial business model and (4) The creation of a new business model successively open and closed models. In the discussion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during the work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

Uudenlaiset arvonluontitavat verkostoissa – Tapaustutkimuksia joukkoistamisesta, parvityöstä ja pelillistämisestä

For years, value creation has been a hot topic in both academic and business literature. Perceptions of value and value creation have changed over time in parallel with economic changes and technological developments. In the early 21st century, we are approaching towards digital service economy where businesses and organizations are increasingly seeking new ways to benefit from business opportunities mostly enabled by the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies. However, due to the novelty and vast number of different concepts not much is known about value creation through social media and recently emerged ICT-based approaches. The purpose of this study was to increase general understanding on social media and ICT-related value creation by exploring different novel value creation approaches in intercompany networks. The study was conducted as a qualitative business research with theoretical and empirical parts. The theoretical part consisted of an extensive literature review focusing on the two key aspects of the study: value creation and novel social media and ICT-based value creation approaches. The empirical part consisted of a multiple case study with three different cases: Konecranes GrabCAD Challenge, xTune and Kaleva Innopinion Campaign. The data was collected with a netnography including participant observations and focused interviews. The participant observations were conducted in case-related online environments and we interviewed four different persons from the case organizations. As a result, this research identified the current trends in value creation and described how they differ from more traditional views by exploring different characteristics that epitomize novelty. The study also introduced several frameworks and models for analyzing and visualizing value creation in networked environments. In addition, the research identified several recently emerged novel value creation approaches that essentially build on social media and other ICT-based approaches, and focused more intensively on crowdsourcing, swarm-work and gamification through the case studies. In conclusion, the case studies revealed that social media and modern ICT are in essential role in enabling value creation and several characteristics of novelty in the cases

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing : the Crowdspirit ® case

Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes. The author defines open innovation as a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use both external and internal ideas and internal and external paths to market. He considers that industrial R&D is undergoing a paradigm shift from the closed to the open model. Information and communication technologies and especially web 2.0 technologies accelerate this shift in so far they provide access to collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the “crowd”. This phenomenon named “crowdsourcing” is defined by Jeff Howe as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined - and generally large – network of people in the form of an open call.” Though this approach may sound appealing to firms and R&D organizations, there is little research available about the strategic use of crowdsourcing for innovation processes. In this paper we develop the argument that crowdsourcing raises a certain number of strategic issues that we discuss on the basis of a real size crowdsourcing experiment. We were associated in the project from the very outset up to the strategic analysis of the company. Our data is made up of the minutes of three strategic workshops with the managers that we completed step by step by additional theoretical study and some benchmarking of crowdsourcing experiments on the web. Although we started this collaboration with no other objectives than to help this company to design its optimal business model, this action research process has led us to address the following research questions: how can a firm create and capture value by means of a strategy based on crowdsourcing? What are the main strategic issues to be considered when a firm intends to open its innovation process through crowdsourcing? Due to the action research approach used, we do not dissociate the theoretical part from the empirical data, but rather to present our research process step by step. We therefore successively present the three main phases of the strategic analysis carried out with the Crowdspirit team: (1) elaboration of Crowdspirit business model; (2) value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3)Theoretical framework on business models based on crowdsourcing. In the conclusion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during this work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.Open innovation, crowdsourcing, business models

CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS AND EFFICIENCY OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend.A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend

Using Web2.0 to support the independent film production process

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Exploiting tacit knowledge through knowledge management technologies

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contributions and suitability of the available knowledge management (KM) technologies, including the Web 2.0 for exploiting tacit knowledge. It proposes an integrated framework for extracting tacit knowledge in organisations, which includes Web 2.0 technologies, KM tools, organisational learning (OL) and Community of Practice (CoP). It reviews a comprehensive literature covering overview of KM theories, KM technologies and OL and identifies the current state of knowledge relating to tacit knowledge exploitation. The outcomes of the paper indicate that Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have stunning prospects for creating learning communities where tacit knowledge can be extracted from people. The author recommends that organisations should design procedures and embed them in their Web 2.0 collaborative platforms persuading employees to record their ideas and share them with other members. It is also recommended that no idea should be taken for granted in a learning community where tacit knowledge exploitation is pursued. It is envisaged that future research should adopt empirical approach involving Complex Adaptive Model for Tacit Knowledge Exploitation (CAMTaKE) and the Theory of Deferred Action in examining the effectiveness of KM technologies including Web 2.0 tools for tacit knowledge exploitation

Business Model Innovation in the Digital Era. A Case Study from the Real Estate Sector

Firms migrating to the digital channel require a successful business model that emphasizes at least the value proposition, the use of technology and the creation of revenue streams. Through time, business models need certain adjustments in one or more of these areas. By using a case study of a successful real estate company from the UK, this paper presents an example of business model innovation that stresses the role of the user scale. It focuses on the use of Web 2.0 technology as the company offers a discussion forum. In-depth interviews, secondary data and website content analysis are used to show the trajectory of the company. Results show that, for a sustainable business model, it is the acquisition and retention activities, which maintain the necessary traffic to keep the model operating and generating new revenue sources. This is particularly relevant for a three-sided market.Las empresas que migran al canal digital requieren un modelo de negocio exitoso que enfatice la propuesta de valor, el uso de la tecnología y la creación de flujos de ingresos. A través del tiempo, los modelos necesitan ciertos ajustes en estas áreas. Usando un caso de estudio de una exitosa compañía de bienes raíces del Reino Unido, este documento presenta un ejemplo de innovación de modelo de negocios que destaca el papel de la escala de usuarios. Se enfoca en el uso de la tecnología Web 2.0, ya que la compañía ofrece un foro de discusión. Entrevistas a profundidad, datos secundarios y el análisis del contenido del sitio web se utilizan para mostrar la trayectoria de la empresa. Los resultados muestran que, para un modelo sostenible, son las actividades de adquisición y retención de usuarios, las que mantienen el tráfico necesario para que el modelo funcione y genere nuevas fuentes de ingresos. Esto es aún más relevante para un mercado de tres vías