Value Chains
Internet technology has dramatically altered the trade-off between vertical and virtual integration (Shah, 2001). The question, “Do the
advantages of focusing on core competencies and outsourcing the rest outweigh the cost of managing added complexity”, is very
relevant. One of the major challenges of e-business is the potential change in the value chains of different industries. The Internet
overturns the old rules about competition and strategy (Werbach, 2000). The changes will vary in different fields and will also depend
on the role the companies play in the value chain. However, the value chain will only be changed if there is added value for the supply
net. The identified key questions were: how to identify and measure the added value for the whole supply net or how to optimize the
entire value chain?
The R&D topics that help to understand the integration processes and their importance according to the workshop are
presented in the Table II. The numbers 0-5 describe how many of the groups in the workshop identified the topic as “very important”.