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Incumbents and the sharing economy: the example of GM

First published on IPdigIT. © Deloitte, 2015: The sharing economy. It is safe to say that the automotive industry experiences some turmoil; cars themselves, as well as the way we are using them, are changing profoundly. Traditional, petrol-powered, cars are slowly being replaced by electric cars and potentially fully autonomous vehicles. On the consumer level, […]

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Article Economics Law

Taking on Uber

First published on IPdigIT. Over the past six years, Uber has become a synonym for on-demand transportation services. The San-Francisco based start-up pioneered the industry and continues to hold the pole position in the American market. According to a recent article on Bloomberg, Uber currently seeks to raise $2.1 billion in a financing round that […]

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Article IT&IP Law Law

La e-réputation des entreprises: lente à construire, rapide à détruire?

First published on IPdigIT. La réputation des entreprises est un actif incorporel important, quoiqu’invisible dans la comptabilité, ce serait même selon certains “l’actif stratégique le plus important sur le plan de la création de valeur. Elle procure à la firme un avantage compétitif unique qui lui permet de se différencier de ses concurrents.” (M. Graziani, […]

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Article Economics

How do comparison shopping sites make a living? An update

First published on IPdigIT. Comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping robots or shopbots, have been around for about two decades. Sites such as Shopping.com, Shopper.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Vergelijk or Kelkoo help us find goods or services that are sold online by providing us with loads of information (products sold, price charged, quality, delivery and […]

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Article Economics

The multisidedness of crowdfunding platforms

First published on IPdigIT. A number of posts on this blog have already dealt with multisided platforms (see here) and with crowdfunding (see here). My aim with this post is to link the two topics and show that crowdfunding platforms are a prime example of multisided platforms. Crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) facilitate the interaction between entrepreneurs […]

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Article Economics

Mind. your own. business school – a case study of a multi-sided platform

First published on IPdigIT. This blog post is based on the comments of Master students to an article posted by Paul Belleflamme on IPdigIT in April 2014. source: mybs.eu A large part of today’s most successful and fastest growing business ventures is in fact multi-sided. Meaning they enable and derive value from the interaction between […]

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A ‘multisourced’ case-study of a multisided platform

First published on IPdigIT. To paraphrase a famous Belgian surrealist artist: “This post is not a post“. More precisely, it is not a post yet, but it should become one once all your comments will be pieced together. My goal, in a very lazy educational way, is to build a case study of a specific […]

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Article Economics

What drives self-regulation in the nascent P2P “ride-sharing” industry?

First published on IPdigIT. The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for ride-sharing services; it appears therefore as a typical two-sided platform. As Evans (2011) explains it, a business opportunity emerges for a two-sided (or multi-sided) platform when […]

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Article IT&IP Law Law

Do you believe in sharing or in owning? Do you rely on commons or on private property?

First published on IPdigIT. An article in the Financial Times (Tim Harford, ‘Do you believe in sharing?’, F.T., August 31/Sept. 1 2013) reminds us of an eternal debate: shall we believe in the ability of humans to adequately share and reasonably use the resources offered by our planet? Or do we have to define property […]

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Article Economics

Online banking, switching costs and competition: a complex story

First published on IPdigIT. (Updated February 7, 2013) In an article published in October 2012 in the New York Times, Nelson D. Schwartz suggests that online banking creates switching costs and, thereby, reduces competition in the US banking sector. The title of the article summarizes the argument in a forceful way: “Online Banking Keeps Customers […]