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Schwab, eBay, Cisco, MP3, Linux, and dozens
of other companies have transformed the rules of competition
in their industries, seemingly overnight. They hijacked
long-entrenched industry leaders with revolutionary offerings
that surprised and delighted customers. These transformers
could not and did not act alone: partners enabled them to
move with stealth, speed, agility, and force. Such teams
of innovators pioneered the business web, or "b-web"
-- the new platform for competition in the twenty-first
century. B-webs -- partner networks of producers, service
providers, suppliers, infrastructure companies, and customers
linked via digital channels -- are destroying the firm as
we have known it and generating wealth in entirely new ways.
In Digital Capital, information-age
visionaries Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy describe
and explain the b-web phenomenon and the forces behind its
emergence. Drawing on three years of multimillion-dollar
research into hundreds of b-webs a s diverse as the Microsoft
Alliance and the automotive industry, the authors illuminate
the five distinct types of b-web now in play: Agoras, Aggregations,
Value Chains, Alliances, and Distributive Networks. Punctuating
their analysis with a rich best of case studies, they provide
the definitive guide to business-model innovation in the
digital economy.
The book includes:
- The untold real story behind the story
on successes like eBay, Cisco, Linux, Schwab, and Priceline
- Positioning and analysis of emergent
e-businesses like Webvan, OptiMark, AT&T Solutions,
and Enron
- A step-by-step process for b-web strategy
design
- A new approach to maximizing organizational
effectiveness in a multi-enterprise environment
- The "A,B,C,D,E's" of marketing
-- heir to the "four P's" of the industrial
age
- Guidelines for deciding whether to hire,
buy, or partner a needed capability
- A new set of lenses for viewing the stock
market
The authors warn that participation in b-webs
is not optional. To encounter and satisfy the digital customer,
firms must lead or partner in one or more of these new business
networks. While no single path leads to b-web success, businesses
will adopt effective b-web strategies -- or they will simply
fade away.
Sustaining advantage in the digital economy
demands more than superficial actions like attracting "eyeballs,"
launching a hot IPO, following "new rules," building
a cool Web site, or even just focusing on customers. In
Digital Capital we finally have a book that gets
beyond whiz-bang cliches to today's central issues of competitive
strategy.
Don Tapscott is author of the international
best-sellers The Digital Economy and Growing
Up Digital. With David Ticoll and Alex Lowy, he also
coedited Blueprint to the Digital Economy. Tapscott
is Chairman, David Ticoll is CEO, and Alex Lowy is Managing
Director of the Alliance for Converging Technologies (www.actnet.com),
an international research and consulting group that advises
corporations and governments worldwide on strategy in the
digital economy.
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