Emerging Concepts in E-Business and Extended Products

To compete in the competitive global marketplace, manufacturers and suppliers have to come up with novel ways of forming alliances to sell their wares. The extended and virtual enterprise concepts have been acknowledged as important paradigms in the modern business environment. Information and communication technologies and the developments around the Internet have brought these issues into sharp focus for managers and researchers alike. Additionally, the success of the Internet has triggered the evolution of a variety of e-phenomena that has helped the evolution of many new ideas and strategies in order to improve the everyday business processes of an enterprise. Buzzwords such as e-commerce, e-business and e-procurement illustrate this trend. Consequently, the analysis of networks and the opportunities to produce products in a collaborative way has become a key issue for both practitioners and researchers.The new business processes and services resulting from these efforts have elicited the evolution of novel concepts in the selling of wares. One such novelty is the concept of packaging core products with additional services to make the overall package more attractive to the prospective customer. This comprehensive packaging, which we term extended products, consists of tangible core (manufactured) products and additional, intangible components. It should also be noted that there is no restriction of the proportions of tangible and intangible components within an extended product. There is no reason why these intangible additions/extensions cannot have more value than the tangible product itself. Furthermore, the formation of extended products is driven not solely by competitive pressures. Legislative pressures, such as those arising out of environmental concerns, are also shifting the responsibility for the life cycle of a product from society at large to the manufacturers. As a consequence, new extended products concepts have evolved that package end-of-life take-back and consequential recycling into the core product.This chapter discusses the drivers for the development of extended products and why it is necessary for manufacturers and suppliers to form formal alliances in order to reliably supply a comprehensive set of extended products. The very first general model of an extended product is also developed.