Plenary Lecture

Changing E-Business Philosophy in Web 2.0 Environment

Professor Zeljko Panian
Faculty of Economics and Business
University of Zagreb
Croatia
E-mail: zpanian@efzg.hr

Abstract: In the early days of e-commerce, somewhere between 1994 and 2000, the driving force of doing business over and in the Internet was individual, personal initiative. Entrepreneurs with ideas – sometimes good and sometimes not successful in their implementation – tried their luck in this new kind of business. From today’s point of view, it was rather straightforward and even naive approach to E-Business and there is no wander many of the pioneers did not survive for a longer time.
After the famous dot-com crash at the very beginning of the 21st century companies started rethinking their E-Business strategies and tried to create sustainable business models based upon the value added by companies themselves, the new era in E-Business development. Many excellent models like brokerage, affiliate, co-operative and many more other worthy models were set up and many of them still dominate the contemporary E-Business arena. The main characteristic of all E-Business models developed in this stage is a kind of “lead-to-cash” approach. But the emergence of Web 2.0 and particularly social networking technologies, supported by computing cloud technologies, revealed an undiscovered gold mine of business potentials – the power of masses and the worth of user-generated content. A growth of social media and networks as well as a huge number of connected customers may be and actually are an important source of virtually endless quantity of innovations and business opportunities. So, the E-Business philosophy is changing towards consumers becoming agents of adding value to products and services offered by businesses while companies position themselves as mediators in collecting, selecting, shaping and implementing people’s contributions through sophisticated new E-Business models. Therefore, monetization of user-driven content forms a basis of the new generation off E-Business models.

Brief Biography of the Speaker: Zeljko Panian is full professor of business informatics at The Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He received his master degree in 1978 and Ph. D. in 1981 at the University of Zagreb. His scientific interests are primarily focused on Enterprise Information Systems, e-Business and Business Intelligence.
He wrote 33 books and more than 180 scientific and professional papers, and lectured as a visiting professor at the People’s University of China at Beijing, Florida State University in Tellahassee (USA), University of Maribor (Slovenia) and University of Sarajevo and Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as nearly all universities in Croatia.
For several times, he delivered invited, keynote and plenary speeches at WSEAS and other international conferences and symposiums.