Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Beyond Digital Ubiquity: The Digital Business Model Iron TriangleWe live in a digital world: digital services surround us in every moment of our daily lives.These devices, such as smartphones, have revolutionised the way we communicate, entertain ourselves, connect and form political opinions, as well as the way we look for information regarding products and services and how we buy and access them.Mobile phones have become more than another digital device since they are now used as an extension of ourselves.Not surprisingly, some of the most successful companies of our times, including Facebook, Google, and Apple, have managed to capitalise on their intimate access to and knowledge of the hyperconnected consumer.They have positioned themselves at the heart of the digital ecosystem, which provides them with unlimited reach to all of us, along with an ability to collect and harvest behavioural data about any end-user.These companies are trading on ubiquity, an omnipresent awareness of the customer and their journey.In this book, we surpass digital ubiquity to analyse how internet companies foster a digital business ecosystem and establish a sustainable competitive advantage by developing new revenue and business models.In this chapter, we contextualise this new digital environment, followed by contrasting the dynamics behind the success of the two transformative digital players -Netflix and Spotifyto illustrate how digital businesses can create, propose, deliver, and capture value.This leads us to propose an Iron triangle of a business model that echoes three key questions: Who is creating value?Which configuration (shape) does this value take?And finally, how sustainable is the competitive advantage?1.1 Be Kind, Rewind Let's stop the time, and rewind.Fifteen years ago, almost none of us had a smartphonethe iPhone was first released in the United States on June 29, 2007.Ten years ago, many of us owned a smartphone, and if we could do almost everything that we can do today via digital devices (the iPad was released in April 2010), most of us did not.The digital devices were available; however, they were not as pervasive, and certainly not ubiquitous.Most of the companies -Google, Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Strava, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, to name a fewthat were going to shape our everyday interactions with one another, with ourselves and with companies and services had already been founded.Certainly, entrepreneurs toyed with ideas and concepts, which are now well established; however, those concepts and ways of interaction had not yet found their spot in our everyday life.We wereat least sometimesstill buying (and using) CDs and renting DVDs.We may still have called hotels to book a room and walked (or phoned) the restaurant for a pizza.We were running without knowing exactly how many kilometres we were running and at which pace.
Source: De Gruyter eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4311653129