Digital Business Models

Perspectives on Monetisation

Adam Jabłoński, Marek Jabłoński

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000193657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: E-Commerce
• Index: Business

By presenting the conditions, methods and techniques of monetisation of business models in the digital economy, this book combines implementation of the theoretical aspects of monetisation with the presentation of practical business solutions in this field.

The scope of the book includes the relationship between the monetisation and scalability degree of business models. The book describes the place and role of the digital business ecosystem in the process of digital transformation. It demonstrates ideological and functional conditions for the use of the concept of sharing to design innovative business models while also presenting a multi-dimensional approach to the use of Big Data and their monetisation in the context of business models. Digital Business Models shows the place and role of ecological and social factors in building digital business models that are part of the concept of the circular economy and presents the contemporary conditions of a sustainability concept that meets the ethical challenges of doing digital business. It demonstrates how important the social factors of business model design and the creation of social value are in modern business and demonstrates. The book explores the servitisation of digital business models using digital technologies and features case studies on the effective solutions of business models that use servitisation as a factor supporting the monetisation of business models.

Written for scholars exploring the efficiency and effectiveness of business models related to contemporary concepts – Sharing Economy, Circular Economy, Network Economy, Big Data, so on – and those designing business models taking into account social aspects, it will also be of direct interest to entrepreneurship courses.

1 The theory of the digital economy

Introduction

Changes in the global economy determine the new logic of understanding concepts that fall within the scope of management science. This is related, among others, to the emergence of new rules, not only in the area of theory but business practices as well. The creation of new spaces opens the way to new thinking, innovative reasoning and synthesising creative and entrepreneurial solutions. This results in the need for interdisciplinary modelling towards the emergence of new trends and directions in management. These trends depict a real picture of management science and become a source of reflection for scientists and managers, which generates new values, perspectives and ideas. The concept of business models, which have been developed in theory and practice for almost two decades, is helpful in the context of new ideas for creating value in the market. Ideological solutions which are relevant to the modern world are operationalised by means of business models. A new picture of economics is being created, whereby its earlier assumptions in many cases fell apart, building a path by which to create its new meanings.

The Internet undoubtedly shapes the new reality of business as well as the sphere of everyday life, building new opportunities for societies and individuals who have been excluded so far. It has a social dimension, whereby solutions built into IT platforms operated from the level of mobile applications are available to most citizens. Such business models supported by certain ideas generate the rapid growth of enterprises focused on exploiting their potential.

A holistic view of this issue should help identify these factors of digital business models and their functionality to create customer-friendly value propositions. Digitalisation is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business (Gardener Glossary, 2018).

Digitisation (i.e. the process of converting analogue data into digital data sets) is the framework for digitalisation, which is defined as the exploitation of digital opportunities. Digitalisation by means of combining different technologies (e.g. cloud technologies, sensors, Big Data, 3D printing) opens unforeseen possibilities and offers the potential to create radically new products, services and BM (Rachinger et al., 2018).

Industry 4.0 is being encouraged by the introduction of digital technologies that push the specialisation of the value chain and also connectivity between actors. Industry 4.0 heralds greater operational efficiency and the development of new products, services and business models (Martín-Peña, Díaz-Garrido, and Sánchez-López, 2018, pp. 91–99).

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the broad context of the theory of the digital economy and the design of contemporary digital business models, as well as transforming services previously provided by analogue formula and currently created by digital economy solutions. The technological perspective opens new opportunities for creating effective business models used to provide such values that could not be delivered without this technology. Ecosystems will survive thanks to the adaptive abilities and resilience of individuals and their interactions (Boschma, 2015, pp. 733–751). Digital business ecosystems are the new forms of value creation in networks in which digital infrastructure streamlines self-organisation mechanisms (Süße et al., 2017, pp. 25–46).

While evolutionary theory encompasses natural systems, digital ecosystems are artificial. Potential participants in shared digital business ecosystems must first establish mechanisms similar to natural ecosystems. They touch upon the dual role of digital technology as an accelerator of environmental turbulence and allow one to deal with complex, dynamic and rapidly changing environments (El-Sawy and Pereira, 2013, pp. 1–12). Briscoe defines the digital business ecosystem as “a distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability inspired by natural ecosystems” (Briscoe, 2010, pp. 39–46).

Digital business ecosystems can be understood as a group of companies or organisations linked by a common interest in the well-being of digital technology in order to materialise them for their own product or service innovation (Selander, Henfridsson, and Svahn, 2013, pp. 183–197).

When summarising this issue, it is worth paying attention to the fact that the digital ecosystem is a specific, new and increasingly important business ecosystem. A digital business ecosystem is constructed when the “adoption of Internet-based technologies for business” is on such a level that “business services and the software components are supported by a pervasive software environment, which shows an evolutionary and self-organising behaviour” (Nachira, 2002, p. 23). In this chapter, it will be particularly important to describe the place and role of the digital business ecosystem in the process of digital transformation. This will also be related to the definition of a digital strategy embedded in the digital business ecosystem. The digital strategy described will be based mainly on intangible and digital resources.

Creating theory in management sciences and its new tendencies

In theoretical terms, management mechanisms require researchers’ insight and the ability to precisely deduce and draw conclusions. In practical terms, they require an understanding of market and business behaviours, as well as the ability to interpret and operationalise them. It becomes important to overtake practice by properly concluding based on facts and using interpretative prediction focused on creating new theories and concepts. In this picture, a number of questions, dilemmas and doubts arise. Thus, it is of particular importance to constantly raise scientific issues and define the related cognitive gaps. The adopted principles of theory of development provide a platform for dialogue with stakeholders of this theory – both researchers and managers, using these principles to achieve management goals in many dimensions. The essence of empirical sciences involves solving scientific problems in the context of two reference areas. The first consists of facts about phenomena or processes of the real and material world, and are related to practical activity. They are the foundation of every empirical science as they constitute the beginning of the practice of science and help to check its results. This is where observation is conducted, the observational situation is identified, the inductive generalisation of facts is carried out and the value of theory is confirmed by the verification or confirmation of hypotheses. …The second reference area consists of theoretical and methodological constructions which the theory is composed of. It is a peculiar system of laws and a necessary attribute of every scientific discipline (Lisiński, 2018, p. 5). In both the first and second cases, ...