Research seminar about how to digitalize an existing business model
Darek M Haftor, Professor at the Department of Informatics, addressed the managerial question of how to transform an existing and non-digital business into a digital business.
On Friday the 4th of March 2016, Professor Darek M Haftor gave a seminar in informatics entitled "Digitalisation of business models: some heuristics".The seminar was part of a research seminar series that features various scientific aspects of digital business research, and was arranged by the Gunilla Bradley Centre for Digital Business.
Success or collapse?
Some companies have succeeded with such transformations. Sonos, for example, did set the goal to reinvent the home audio for the digital age and is today a highly successful business. Kodak, on the other hand, was not only a global leader for camera and film but also invented the first digital camera. Yet the company collapsed in 2012 due to its inability to adapt its business model to digital technologies.
While any transformation from non-digital into digital business is highly complex, and there are no and probably will not be any perfect recipes for such a transformation, professor Haftor presented a set of dimensions for the digitalization of business models. These dimensions include output re-bundling, activity de-coupling, actor re-scheduling, re-structuring of transactions and their mechanisms, and re-framing of governance structures. While we can observe that these dimensions are employed by various successful digital businesses, the ongoing research attempts now to understand how these dimensions may be combined in order to generate successful digital business models.