Research Motivation

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C ^HAPTER 1: I NTRODUCTION

1.1. R ^ESEARCH M ^OTIVATION

The rapid progressions in technology have been transforming the economy and environment in ways that were never thought possible. This is especially true for the rapidly progressing Internet. Over the last two decades, the Internet, a massive communications network that connects digital devices globally has changed the social and economic construct of the world and continues to do so with its on-going progression. It has challenged and changed the way traditional business functions and operates as well as the relationship between consumers, producers and service provides. Namely, the Internet provided a multitude of medium that redefines communication, consumption and supply. The medium includes the World Wide Web, commonly known as the Web, email, data transferring, remote computing, real-time communication, etc.

The Web, among many other Internet medium that has introduced many significant disruptive innovations is the most prominent medium of the Internet (Aghaei, Nematbakhsh et al. 2012). It is the largest transformable information construct to date introduced and formulated conceptually by Tim Burners-Lee (Aghaei, Nematbakhsh et al. 2012). Namely, the Web provides access to data such as documents, images, audio, video and many other resources while interconnecting its stakeholders and the available data. More importantly, according to its key initiator, Tim Burners-Lee, “the Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.”

Since its introduction in 1989, the Web has gone through a series of on-going evolution and progression that enabled emerging and groundbreaking web technologies which significantly impacted the world socially, politically, economically, environmentally and more.

One of the easier to measure aspects of the evolving and progressing Web’s influence is its economic impact on the world. The on-going evolution and progression of the Web provided the possibilities and opportunities for virtual and

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digital businesses to emerge, hence forming the virtual and digital economy. Though accurate measurements of the virtual and digital economy remain debatable, the estimated size’s order of magnitude still plays a substantial role in the overall economy. In 2012, The Boston Consulting Group estimates the size of, what it terms the “internet economy” for 2010, at $2.3 Trillion for the G20 group of countries, or approximately 4.1% of their Gross Domestic Product (David Dean, Sebastian DiGrande et al. 2012). According to another research conducted by International Data Corporation summarized by Oxford Economics, the economy size of the Web, when global business-to-business, consumer transactions, global markets for digital products and services are added together, will equate to an estimated $20.4 trillion in 2013 (Raman Chitkara, Tom Archer et al. 2011). From a narrower economic perspective, in terms of just singular successful businesses, the economic values that each of these businesses have created remain substantial. For instance, the evolving and progressing Web has provided opportunity for innovative giants such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and many others to thrive and attain economic successes.

Being the most prominent portion of the Internet, the Web’s evolution and progression not only provided tremendous amount of business opportunities and technological advances that that would eventually asserts the Web’s direct influence in the overall economy, it also enabled the web to further spread its influences to the evolving and progressing Internet, even the entire digital world. In other words, the evolution and progression of the Web plays a significant role in the evolution and progression of the Internet, which would in turn permeate to the fundamental building block of the modern world, the digital world. Therefore, to thrive in a constantly changing environment of the modern world, it is crucial for the Web’s stakeholders, namely, all those that are affected by the Web to understand how the Web evolves and progresses.

The Web evolves and progresses in an extremely complicated manner involving many different components of the Web and the other Internet media. These components interact in multi-directional relationships involving variant factors and

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intertwined processes. Despite the complexity of the interaction between different components, the Web, or the Internet as a whole, serves the ultimate high-level purpose to establish and enhance people-to-people, machine-to-machine and machine-to-people connections and relationships. Therefore, the evolution and progression of the Web would center and focus around establishing and enhancing these connections and relationships. This characteristic of the Web resonates with a techno-social system’s characteristics, hence, the Web’s evolution and progression would center and focus on enhancing the processes of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration (Fuchs, Hofkirchner et al. 2010).

Different from other techno-social systems, the Web is a techno-social system that involves more than 2 billion stakeholders (Lynn 2010). As a platform connecting and relating such massive crowd along with the data that the crowd has generated in a relatively accessible and convenient fashion compared to traditional connection and relating platforms, the evolving and progressing Web is not only supporting and enhancing the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration, the evolving and progressing Web might be changing them.

Specifically, this would imply that the web could be causing new forms of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration to develop.

Innovation, regardless incremental or disruptive is dependent on the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration; thus, changes in the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration would imply changes in the innovative processes. This further implies that these changes can introduce changes in business and the economy since it is well noted that innovation is closely related to growth in business and the economy (Ahlstrom 2010).

Therefore, close examination of how the evolving and progressing Web changed cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration could provide insights to how it changed the innovative processes, hence, the business and the economy growth.

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Co-production (Bendapudi and Leone 2003) and co-creation (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) were among some of the collaborative practices derived and summarized from the changes in the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration. The inclusion of these two collaborative practices in the innovative processes has inverted the innovative processes. This would indicate that these collaborative practices connected the relationship between changes in the innovation processes and the changes in process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration. The Web’s evolution and progression in have enabled the possibility, viability and convenience of bringing such collaborative practices into the innovative processes. For instance, the Web has enabled crowd-sourcing, a mechanism that harnesses and maximizes the advantages of the co-production and/or co-creation concepts by crowd involvement over the web (Zwass 2010). This mechanism established the possibility and viability of crowd involvement in the innovative processes via the co-production and/or co-creation concepts. However, as the Web evolves and progresses, a new mechanism, crowdservicing (Davis 2011), have emerged. Dissimilar to the previous crowd-souring mechanism based on the concepts of co-production and co-creation, this new mechanism appears to be based on a different concept with emphasis on services (Davis and Lin 2011). In other words, the evolving and progressing web have introduced a new concept by causing changes in the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration. Since this new concept is also derived from the changes in the process of cognition, communication, cooperation and collaboration; thus, to resonate with the terms co-production and co-creation, this new concept would be termed co-service.

As a part of a constantly and rapidly evolving and progressing techno-social system, stakeholders of the Web are subjected to turbulence that can either lead to rapid success or failure. Therefore, understanding key factors that lead to success and failure in such turbulent environment is crucial for its stakeholders. The introduction and application of the co-production and co-creation innovative process in the Web has generated immense positive impacts and business

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opportunities. For instance, web Giant eBay among many others has benefited greatly from the use of the crowd-sourcing mechanism that promoted co-creative activities between its users, while many other firms that did not enable co-creation via the crowd-sourcing mechanism has suffered deeply from this turbulence (Howe 2006). From this perspective, though co-service is a rather preliminary concept, understanding the implications of the co-service concept in the context of the Web may provide a better understanding on future trends in the Web’s turbulent environment. Furthermore, if co-service can provide as much benefit as co-creation had or more, the application of co-service on the Web can greatly benefit businesses and organizations. In essence, understanding a preliminary concept of co -service and the changes from co-creation to co-service may allow businesses and organization to understand the possible turbulences created by the Web as well as the opportunities created by the Web. In addition, if the co-service concept would revolutionize the Web, the Internet, and even the digital world resembling the co-creation concept did and had, understanding the co-service concept would provide a more comprehensive understanding of future paradigm shifts in the digital world, subsequently, the world.