Business Opportunities on the Internet

September 1997

" Internet can open new avenues to your business"

by Pier Carlo Montecucchi

Intelligence-Net Office USA (Tallahassee, FL - New York, NY)

EU Advanced Workshop in Biotechnology - Villa Olmo, Como, Italy

1-7 September, 1997

"We are in the verge of a revolution that is just as profound as the change in the economy that came with the industrial revolution. Soon electronic networks will allow people to transcend the barriers of time and distance and take advantage of global markets and business opportunities not even imaginable today, opening up a new world of economic possibility and progress."

Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.

Each company pratically in every industrial sector is under increasing pressure : (i) to reduce cost, (ii) to increase efficiency, (iii) to speed up new products discovery / development (with a tremendous leap in value, not on competing with the network), (iv) to generate environmental benefit.

Escalating global competition, demanding customers, accelerating changes are forcing companies to re-evaluate

how they do business

the type of products and services they choose to offer

how quickly they must bring those products and services to market.

The internet (= the global computer information network^*) has critical capabilities to help your company in different ways. in particular, using the information available into the cyberspace, companies have the opportunity to navigate market dynamics reducing risk and find unexpected opportunities for commercial development (=electronic commerce solutions). In addition, using Internet you can develop strategic partnering with the following results:

new services

new technology

new products

new and growing companies

more investments

increased ROI (with the lateral approach for business development)

new jobs

improved economy

At this regard the most important question is to have the capability to turn information into knowledge. All companies, large and small, in today's world have virtually the same access to information. The companies that convert available information into actionable intelligence will end up winning the game. Intelligence will make the difference between two competitors that sell similar products and have similar access to markets. Business decisions are based on a combination of experience, gumption and intelligence. Without the last item, you may succeed in winning a battle or two, but you can't expect to win the war. Whether you are a small grocery store or a large conglomerate, information is a relatively inexpensive and easily obtainable commodity. Electronic databases, CD-ROMs and other information vehicles (as the disparate nature of the Web's information source) allow anyone the freedom to ask almost any question imaginable about the competition. The major problem is to ask the right question and then to analyze the resulting answers, without to forget that intelligence has a short shelf life. It is imperative to apply it immediately.

Starting from the concept of intelligence as (i) knowledge, information or sentiment and (ii) mutual conveyance of information, the intelligence process includes the following steps:

TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE that forewarns about scientific and technical developments that will adversely affect the shelf-life of current technologies; it alerts of new technical opportunities;
COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE that identifies WHO threatens your markets and / or customers with WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW.

Technology Intelligence and Competitor Intelligence together will contribute to building BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, that is the radar, signal processor, communicator network that alerts senior managers to events that will impact business strategies, plans and tactics. All these data will constitute part of the so-called BUSINESS DATA WAREHOUSE, which is the repository system, consolidated from all data sources across the enterprise. This warehouse is the competitor advantage in the escalation of the corporate information war. At the same time the company must develop inside a new kind of organizational behavior, in particular:

(i) to prepare the organization

(ii) to motivate the troops

(iii) to store and deliver the intelligence

with managers thinking of opportunities / operations in terms of cyberspace (PERSONNEL INTELLIGENCE).

In fact "knowledge isn't like other inventory - it can't just sit in the warehouse until needed, then be dusted off and used. It has to be kept fresh, relevant, and alive. It has to be exercised through continual discussion and revision" ( J. Browning and S. Reiss, 1998).

In general, the companies have systems that are not sufficient to be competitive in the current environment. In addition, considering:

the growth complexity of technology
the expectation of the customers
the lack of resources to address it
the cost to develop the necessary competence

they are reaching ouside their organization and accept the services of consultants (or "integrators / alliance partners") (i) to leverage both the infotech proficiency and other competence of the consultants to enhance their business (ii) to supplement their in-house capabilities.

Companies react also to the competitive challenges and novel corporate opportunities offered into the cyberspace by adopting new corporate structures, entering into strategic and tactical partnerships and creating new financial arrangements. The development of complex financial instruments - like derivatives - permits companies to decrease or increase their exposure to risk virtually overnight. People is now focusing their brain and fortunes not on factories, assembly lines and loading docks, but on companies without them. They are creating new products and attempting to thrive in the world of so-called VIRTUAL COMPANIES [virtual industrial districs, the agile web, the web virtual office (as the second generation of web sites)]. This corporate model (THE NETWORKED ENTERPRISE) is one where the boundaries between firms, between customers and suppliers and between competitors is much more blurred. By strengthening their links with customers, partners, suppliers and distributors (using intr@net / extr@net solutions) in a seamless networked environment, companies can quickly bring to market (i) the precise products and services the customer demands, (ii) when the customer wants them. This kind of corporate form can exist elsewhere; but there has to be an openness of information flow and capital flows. A virtual corporation (by the term coined by venture capitalist William Davidow) is a business organization that can be many things to many people, quite apart from the rigid, hierarchical corporations of today. In this vision, the corporation's structure is determined by its customers rather than its executives [Pierre Levy in: Becoming Virtual: realty in the digital age - Plenum Trade, New York and London (1998)]. The virtual corporations are actually taking advantage of new information technologies to create the smaller, more versatile economic units of the coming era.

The virtual versus the traditional corporation

Telecommuting
Electronic communications network
Software resources to promote cooperation	Physical presence (hierarchical processes)
Spatio - temporal coordinates in continuous evolution	Stable spatio - temporal coordinates
The center of gravity as a coordination process	The center of gravity in a group of buildings, workstations & schedules

The virtual factory represents an evolutionary step from the monolytic factory. The virtual company can be considered a community of factories, each focused on what it does best, all linked by an electronic network that would enable them to operate as one- flexible and inexpensive - regardless of their location [Readon W. (1998) Biotech Corporate Structure: Searching for a new paradigma - in: Genetic Engineering News - Guide to biotechnology companies, ix - x, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publisher]

For example, in the biotechnology sector, people can fund a virtual company, starting from a well defined technology background, possibly patented (proprietorship or obtained by license). In case of positive results on a compound, the animal /human trials (including the toxicological studies) are made by a different organization [with the help of the so-called "virtual animals" (Knapschaefer, J. (1998) A good day for lab rats, in Business Week, March 23, 89]. With the FDA approval, the company can outsource the processes of manufacturing, marketing and sales around the world in consideration of the requested expertise and the costs.

In summary, the development and the use of the global computer information network can help all of us meet our common goal:

of generating economic growth

of improving our school and health care

of better protecting the environment

at lower costs

of reinventing our goverment at all level

of permitting that anyone, including those with disabilities, will be able to access and use these systems anywhere, anytime.

REFERENCE

Using the Internet for Technology Transfer and Licensing - Conference sponsored by the Licensing Executives Society (U.S.A. and Canada), Inc. - Chemicals, Polymers and Associated Industries Committee (E-4) - 15 -16 April 1996, Crystal Gateway Marriott, Crystal City, VA (USA)

^* The Internet is a packed-switched network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the department of Defense to give researchers access to databases and computers. The internet dates from 1969 when the ARPANET was started. The Internet has grown into a large , diverse community of online users that is self-governing and that develops its own procedures. Physically , it is the "global network of individual networks interconnected through a specific set of conventions (mainly via the telephone network) allowing communication to place between two separate machines". It is characterized by ubuquitous access by the public with variable security. Nodes on the Internet share a common TCP/IP addressing interface. The Internet spans most countries, consists of several thousand networks, and has million of users. It is expected that distributed multimedia over the Internet will rapidly increase , allowing the delivery of sounds and video over the network as bandwidth increases for more users. Internet activities include sending messages over email, conducting group discussion over Usenet, accessing databases, and "surfing" World Wide Web documents, or pages, that are linked to one another. [from "The Dictionary of Multimedia - Terms & Acronyms" by Brad Hansen - FD, Chicago - London (1999)