درباره ایجاد و ارزیابی انواع مدل کسب و کار الکترونیک: مورد حراجی

E-business model variants aim at creating customer value through differentiation. At the core are two major components of the business model concept—business process and customer value. Focusing narrowly on these components, this paper provides a new and systematic way to identify both, create potentially competitive variants, and to evaluate them quantitatively. With a clear presentation of the whole business process, it is possible to highlight key sub-processes, and increase a shared understanding between multiple stakeholders. Moreover, understanding customer preference and the expected market share of potential variants can allow managers to benefit from clear value propositions for variants' potential profitability. Our method also promotes rapid and efficient consensus-building about the most competitive variant. Taken together, our proposed method will help both managers and researchers refine the business model more precisely. An e-auction case in Korea is presented to illustrate the empirical application of our method in detail.

As information systems have increasingly become integral parts of business, it is essential to develop business models as abstractions of how a business functions (Eriksson & Penker, 1999). A number of studies have attempted to define the concept of a business model, or at the very least, to identify its major components (Applegate, 2001, Timmers, 1998 and Weill and Vitale, 2001). But disappointingly, the business model concept, which is grounded in multiple domains, remains ill-defined and unclear (Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002 and Magretta, 2002). A wide range of definitions have been advanced, from comprehensive and strategic frameworks involving actors such as customers, competitors, suppliers, etc. (Joyce and Winch, 2004, Timmers, 1998, Venkatranam and Henderson, 1998 and Weill and Vitale, 2001) to codified business processes which are integrated with information technology (Kiolov, 2002 and Kukalis and Senf, 1994). There have been similar difficulties in arriving at a consensus about an e-business model, with no generally accepted definition emerging from the wide array of suggestions as of yet. Some researchers have focused on identifying theoretical components, and have drawn up some general categories based on similarities (Joyce and Winch, 2004 and Morris et al., 2005). Put simply, the primary concern for any business model is how to make money; hence, an economic concern is indispensable in any definition. Relevant components include financial structures, revenue sources, price, etc. Given the strong emphasis on the need to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, another prominent but more rudimentary category consists of strategic components. Value creation is particularly important to the customer and other stakeholders. Finally, the architectural configuration at the operational level, where there are close links to information systems, has to be represented. Business processes have to be at the core of the model, as people recognize that processes are what business is about (Olud, 1995), while other necessary components include resource flows, logistical streams, product/service delivery methods, etc. Put together, the notion of an e-business model must build on economic, strategic and operational aspects (Morris et al., 2005). For any e-business model, these three aspects have their specific demands, which must be satisfied simultaneously. However, e-business model variants face most of the same demands as the original e-business model, and thus it should be sufficient to focus on a couple of core components. In developing variants, companies' primary concern is how to differentiate them, and thus create customer value. There is an important perception that a business process should clarify what a business does and how it does it. Hence, once business processes are described in detail, the difference between the original and its variant will become clearer. Suffice to say, a clear business process, together with a sound customer value proposition, should be central to e-business model variants. The question of how to create and evaluate e-business models has rarely been dealt with. Given so many different definitions and the daunting number of components, it is no wonder researchers have struggled to organize them into systematic methods. Although value has always been a key center of interest, previous studies do not go beyond identifying sources of value and suggesting qualitative mechanisms of value creation, delivery and appropriation (Afuah and Tucci, 2000, Amit and Zott, 2001, Han and Han, 2001 and Rayport and Jaworski, 2001). While such work is still useful as strategic guidance, it cannot respond to one of the urgent demands of today's e-business industry. As risks are high and returns are difficult to secure, the e-business world has realized that it is crucial to develop a quantitative evaluation method to judge whether an e-business model will be truly competitive or not. Recent studies such as Joyce and Winch (2004) are beginning to work on this problem, but there is still a long way to go. No less important, the challenge of exploring ideas and creating new e-business models in a formal way has also hardly been addressed. However, challenged on many fronts to create new e-business models as engines of future growth, both researchers and managers are beginning to address this problem. Gordjin and Akkermans (2003) proposed the e3 value approach, and extended it into BASSIE (business-oriented approach supporting web services idea exploration) by adding the i⁎ framework (Van der Raadt, Gordijn & Yu, 2005). Such methods aim at searching for profitable new e-commerce ideas, but cannot define the underlying business process. However, in the case of e-business model variants, the fact that there are fewer core components allows us to focus specifically on business process and customer value. The generic NPD (new product development) process provides the conceptual basis for the overall development process. With some modifications, it is possible to develop a new and systematic e-business model variant creation method with a quantitative customer value proposition and a well-defined business process. To this end, methodologies from multiple disciplines are used in combination. For creation, business process modeling, DSM (design structure matrix) and concept combination table are used sequentially. Conjoint analysis plays a central role in evaluation, and makes it possible to estimate the potential market competitiveness of generated e-business model variants. The next section introduces the basic concepts and applications of these methods. A conceptual framework follows, giving a rationale for how these methods are inter-related. The empirical research framework and the general theoretical procedure are then noted, after which an empirical case of developing e-auction variants in Korea is presented to illustrate the application procedure in practice. Our final sections discuss theoretical and managerial implications and draw some conclusions as to the pros and cons of our method.

History has shown that the success of a new e-business model is not guaranteed even if it is innovative and new to the market. While the e-business model provides a vast number of potentially profitable opportunities, it can still be a risky development. Thus, a systematic method for new e-business model creation with sound value proposition needs to be developed. However, the business model concept, lacking clear definitions, struggles to cope with such demands. By focusing narrowly on e-business model variants, we can concentrate on a couple of core components: business process and customer value. A combination of interdisciplinary methods makes it possible to identify both components clearly, create potentially competitive e-business model variants, and evaluate them in a quantitative way. Our method is conducive to e-business model studies in a variety of ways. First, we provide a new and systematic way to create and evaluate e-business model variants. Although it has not yet been widely tested, we believe our method can serve as a starting point for a more general business model concept. It will help researchers identify the major components of the business model concept—business process and customer value—and further contribute to building a more generally well-received concept of the business model. In practice, we offer a systematic way of creating potentially competitive variants of existing e-business models that are well-defined and easily put into operation. Viewed from a broader perspective, our method will help managers and developers refine the e-business models more accurately. Another key benefit is the ability to measure sound value propositions in a quantitative way. Less competitive variants are screened efficiently at an early stage, and with the availability of information as to the expected market shares of surviving variants, opinions as to the most competitive variant can converge rapidly and without severe conflict. Despite being useful, the seminal character of this research means it has some limitations, and thus suggests the need for further studies. The primary concern is the complexity of existing business processes. If the existing business process is too complex, business process modeling is forced to decompose it into a large number of sub-processes, making the process of subsequent re-combination a daunting task. Other techniques will need to be introduced to manage this complexity. A lack of a shared understanding between researchers and managers is likely to weaken the evaluation results. If generated variants are difficult to understand, or cannot be easily distinguished from one another, the rank order preference data will become unreliable, leading to inaccurate value propositions, and making the expected market share of variants difficult to assess accurately. Advanced survey techniques such as close interviews and focus groups can improve data reliability. Finally, dealing with a wider range of heterogeneous e-business models could lead us to being able to identify more, and more innovative, variants.