Transforming Traditional BusinessModels through Disruptive Technology
Cameron Crane, Fred L. Kitchens · Cardinal Scholar (Ball State University) · 2013
The application of disruptive technologies to business processes has given rise to new business models. Three of the disruptive technologies discussed here are software, the Internet, and Web 2.0. Businesses that implement these technologies are able to automate value chain activities, disintermediate supply chains, and benefit from customer contributions. Each disruptive technology and its application has implications for the firm’s value chain and supply chain, and leads to a new ecommerce model incorporating a new term, customersourcing. In this paper, the authors propose to coin the term customersourcing as a subcategory of crowdsourcing and a method of eliciting contributions from a firm’s customers. This paper considers the implications of each technology in sequence, with each step resulting in a change in the supply chain and/or the value chain. The culmination of these changes is an e-commerce model that relies on CustomerSourcing to provide certain business functions of both the supply chain and the value chain.