It established fact (and perhaps obvious) that new systems create strong opportunities for invention and economic growth. Furthermore, as highlighted in the task of Schumpeter (and many more since), the fact that technological change leads to both creation and damage is an essential part of entrepreneurship and technology. Consequently, which means that technological change isn’t just about creating new efficiency assets and opportunities to contend with old industrial models but also enables the design of new business models and supports radically new strategies. Beyond the issue of the intrinsic extent of technological change (i.e. the impact of the new technology), ecosystems, and business models are key determinants of the actual impact of technical change.
While such issues may arise from any technical change, they have been prevalent in the case of sectors that ‘have eliminated digital’ especially, precisely because of the extremely specific characteristics of ICTs and the internet: pervasiveness and flexibility. It has made them functional in any framework and in any organizational environment, enabling them to support an array of strategies thereby. As a consequence, the digital economy has been characterized by a continuous battle between traditional and emerging ecosystems (e.g. Apple’s iTunes) and between ‘old’ and ‘new’ business models (e.g. ‘boxed’ video games is ‘freemium’ games).
Radical changes in infrastructure and the growth of digital services have had a durable influence on ecosystems. Indeed, the increased role of systems, the new forms of partnerships (e.g. open up innovation), value string transformations, industrial market configurations, intellectual property rights (IPRs), performance economy, and ‘servicisation’ are a few of the crucial aspects of the digital revolution. Within the last few years, the concepts of business models and ecosystems have been increasingly used by practitioners and academics alike, in particular, for the second option, in literature related to internet economy, creativity management, entrepreneurship, difficulty and evolutionary economics.
- Visits & Advising
- User Experience assessment would be beneficial
- Liaising with customers, software suppliers and developers
- Low: 1 tweet per day
- Visualization, Reporting, and Analytics
- To build relationships with potential customers
- Branch Sales Manager
- Write the acceptance criteria (thus further expressing certain requirements through good examples)
The disruptive changes as a result of ICTs and the internet have made these emerging concepts of critical importance not only in the digital economy but also throughout the market as a whole. While maximizing the advantages of technological change depends on both ecosystems and business models, the two cannot be considered from one another independently.
Whereas strong and adaptive ecosystems are motorists of strong value creation, sufficient business models are required in order to fully capture this value. Hence, the interactions between business models and ecosystems and their co-evolution are of critical importance. Likewise, the roles played by stakeholders (specifically new ones) in both ecosystems and business models have to be thoroughly understood.
The aim of this special issue is to gather articles concentrating on the role of business models and ecosystems in leveraging technical change. The issue will carry modified and substantially prolonged versions of selected papers provided at the workshop “Leveraging Technological Change: The Role of Business Models and Ecosystems” (19 March 2014, London, UK). However, we also strongly request and encourage submissions from research workers unable to be a part of the workshop.
