Choose one particular innovation that has shaped the sector that you have focused on in your presentation. Characterize the innovation and its evolution, by making explicit reference to the notions you have learnt in class i.e. incremental vs. radical/discontinuous innovation, component vs. architectural innovation, platform innovation & trajectories, technology push/market pull, innovation life-cycle, user-led innovation, etc.
"With the rise of the Internet the scope for service innovation has grown enormously - not for nothing is it sometimes called "a solution looking for problems". The traditional picture of services being either offered as a standard to a large market or else highly specialized and customized to a particular individual able to pay a high price is "blown to bits" by the opportunities of Web-based technology. Now it becomes possible to offer both richness and reach at the same time - and thus to create totally new markets and disrupt radically those which exist in any information-related businesses"[1].
Once it was possible to trade on the Internet, lots of people decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Different ways and models of business were tried, some of them copied from the real life, some trying to create new ones. Plenty of them did not survive the test of time, other became very profitable. The period of "dot.com bubble" teaches that the clue to sustaining a competitive advantage is in continuous innovation, and only those companies are likely to survive in a highly competitive market. The most popular examples of e-commerce are online shopping and online auctions.
It is hard to talk about online shopping at a time when the basic way to use the Internet was a computer terminal. The history of online shopping begins with the invention of the World Wide Web and the opening of the network to the commercial application. The first business use dates back to 1994, when Pizza Hut allowed to order pizza over the Internet for...