Binding: Digital Format: Download: PDF Label: Harvard Business Review Manufacturer: Harvard Business Review Number Of Pages: 12 Publication Date: 2000-11-01 Publisher: Harvard Business Review Release Date: 2008-10-25 Studio: Harvard Business Review
Editorial Reviews:
Using the Internet to facilitate business-to-business commerce promises many benefits, such as dramatic cost reductions and greater access to buyers and sellers. Yet little is known about how B2B e-commerce will evolve. The authors argue that changes in the financial services industry over the past two decades provide important clues. Exchanges, they say, are not the primary source of value in information-intensive markets; value tends to accumulate among a diverse group of specialists that focus on such tasks as packaging, standard setting, arbitrage, and information management. Because scale and liquidity are vitally important to efficient trading, today's exchanges will consolidate into a relatively small set of mega-exchanges. For many companies, traditional skills in such areas as product development, manufacturing, and marketing may become relatively less important, while the ability to understand and capitalize on market dynamics may become considerably more important.
