The Business Model Handbook for Developing Countries

The Business Model Handbook (BMH) for developing countries is a proposition for a tool that has the goal to help Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) and local entrepreneurs to design business models in the context of developing economies that use ICT and particularly the Internet. The BMH should be a Web-based tool that relies on the Business Model Framework (BMF) outlined above. It is essential that this tool is driven by user demand and realized through direct participation of targeted end users. It should not be perceived as a kind of Trojan horse (Afemann, 2000) to impose business and ICT concepts of rich countries. ICT use should be proportional to the capacities of its adopters. In other words, firms should only use technologies if they effectively bring advantages. The relationship between costs and opportunities should remain realistic.

The goal of the BMH for Developing Countries is threefold. The first goal consists in the transfer of business knowledge for better understanding the information society. ICT has had an important impact on business and enterprise structure and therefore make it necessary to rethink the way a firm builds it business. Business model design relying on the BMF detailed above shall allow local SMEs and entrepreneurs to be competitive in a increasingly global economy (see Figure 2).


Figure 2: Business Model Handbook

The second goal of the BMH is to help SMEs and local entrepreneurs identify new opportunities arising through ICT deployment in developing countries. Firms in emerging economies have several competitive advantages, such as low wages, that they could not exploit without profiting of the recent ICT evolution. Government agencies and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) should be involved in the supplying of local/regional information and should be consulted in the construction of a BMH for a specific country or region. Typically, this concerns information on local taxes, specific trade regulations and other legal frameworks.

The last goal and probably the most important aspect of the BMH is the collection of successful case studies of firms in developing countries that have adopted ICT in their businesses. The goal of this repository is to make replicable, transportable and scalable cases of ICT adoption in developing countries easily available. These cases would be different from similar existing Web-repositories of international organizations and NGOs. The cases would be decomposed and formally described by using our framework, based on a building block-like approach. This scenario has the advantage because cases can be searched and analyzed according to their different business model "blocks." One entrepreneur might want to know what kind of value proposition has been adopted by other firms in developing countries, whereas a manager might want to learn more about digital distribution channel strategies and a third one might want to understand more about the opportunities in infrastructure management or partner networks. This project shares with the Process Handbook project of the MIT (Malone et al., 1999) the key idea that a repository and the associated computerized tool can significantly enhance the creativity and the efficiency of business model designers (process model designers in the case of the MIT).



Managing Globally with Information Technology
Managing Globally with Information Technology
ISBN: 193177742X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 224

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