Foundations of E-Commerce

Topic 1: Digital Business Models - Opportunities and Challenges

Week 1 -  Market Friction

• When and how do digital business models add value? 
  
• What are the pain points that can be eliminated going digital?
• What is the best way to analyze an industry to understand opportunities for IT-driven solutions?
• What are some major challenges that existing Bricks-and-Mortar (BAM) companies face when they move online?
• How can they cope with these challenges to compete with pure-play competitors? 
  
• How will competition unfold between pure-play and BAM companies in future? 

Topic 2: Strategies for Disrupting Industries and Markets

Week 2 -  Disruptive Technologies

• How are new entrants compete with incumbents and existing players who have long dominated an industry?
• What are the blind spots that new entrants can exploit?
• What kinds of new innovations have a tendency to displace existing products and services?
• Why is it that incumbents fall prey to new innovations?
• What can they do to ensure sustainability?
• Faced with new innovations, what strategies should incumbents deploy?
  
• Overall, what are some technology-based strategies to disrupt existing industries and counter-strategies combat them?
  

Topic 3: Architectures - A New Source of Competitive Advantage

Week 3 - Online Architectures

• What advantages do technology architectures provide and why does infrastructure make a difference in the online world (especially when the latter is considered akin to a utility)?
• What are some companies whose enduring basis of competitive advantage is technology architecture?
• Why are such advantages enduring?
  
• What second- and higher-order benefits do the underlying architecture enable?

Topic 4: Networks and their Dynamics

Week 4 -  Network Effects

• Why is it that most online contexts seem to be characterized by a winner-takes-all dynamics?
  
• Why do online companies scale and grow so fast?
• How is the value of a network-based business different from a traditional company?
• how can traditional companies become more like networks?
• How can they morph from being product-based to networks to platforms?

Topic 5: Democratization of Everything

Week 5 - Social Media

• How do we understand the phenomenon of democratization in which the crowds are challenging established institutional structures?
  
• When can crowds be a sustainable and transformation force?
• What can companies do to tap this emerging social resource?
• While social media and its power are well-known, what lessons can we learn from it to understand the broader notion of social transformation?

Topic 6: Interpretive and Predictive Power of Concepts

Week 6 - Application of Concepts

• Application of the various concepts and tools studied to different industries and companies - case studies
• Appreciate how the concepts capture the competitive dynamics of an industry and explain the competitive jockeying taking place both currently and in the past