Electronic Commerce and Organizational Innovation: Aspects and Opportunities

Over the past decade, electronic commerce on the technological foundation of the Web-Internet compound has entered extensive areas of organizational and social activity. This broad-based organizational and technological development requires categorization in order to be understood in its entirety and exploited fully. The principal aspects of e-commerce are identified in five domains: commerce, collaboration, communication, connection, and computation. These aspects lead to specific innovational opportunities that can be exploited to organize and address marketplaces, offer innovative products, collaborate with business partners, transform business processes, and organize the delivery of information-system services. The result is a comprehensive framework of e-commerce as a technologically based means to business transformation and a metadisciplinary research field.