is co-created
4
among community members (com-
pared to co-creation of value between users and
the SP). CNS’s serve business-to-consumer (B2C)
and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) markets, and have
some distinguishing characteristics. The most funda-
mental include:
• Community Orientation. CNS’s emphasize a
membership forming one or more user communities
on a virtual communication medium. In contrast to
formal organizations, these virtual communities are
typically transparent, pursue loose and open-ended
goals, and are loosely governed.
• Value Creation. In a CNS users deriveconsiderable
value through interactions with other users within
some particular service context. Unlike in typical e-
services, the role of the SP is merely to facilitate these
community activities while encouraging (rather than
precluding) direct user-created value.
• Information Visibility. An information repository
is continuously accumulated as a result of user activ-
ity and widely accessible to all users. It yields in-
creasing value (for both users and the SP) over time
through large quantities of public information (as op-
posed to more limited quantities of business and trade
secrets stored in corporate IS’s).
When operational and technological practicalities are
considered, other noteworthy characteristics include:
• Innovation Model. More so than incumbent ser-
vices, many SP’s appear to actively involve users in
the ongoing evolution and enhancement of services.
Exploiting the openness of the Web technologies, in-
novative capability can also be created by encourag-
ing third-parties extensions and compositions.
• Smaller Reliance on Human Workforces. The
technical platform supports direct service functional-
ity and necessary support functions (e.g. billing and
user service), and customer-facing human workforces
can, to a large extent, be “crowdsourced” to the com-
munity (for instance in governance functions).
• Operational Models. Operations require data cen-
ters managed by the SP, though third parties can also
host infrastructure pieces. The data centers realize
service-specific functions and the burden of main-
taining user-facing service-specific software follow-
ing the software as a service (SaaS) model
5
.
CNS represents a convergence of two trends:
all connected internally and externally to other service sys-
tems by value propositions.”
4
Value co-creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) is con-
trasted with transactions in which there is a clear distinction
between the “sources” and “recipients” of value.
5
In SaaS, the installation of service-specific software in
the users’ access devices is avoided by executing software
in the data center or by software dynamically downloaded
and executed in the user’s environment.
• Service Provider Evolution. The service indus-
tries are moving toward increased online presence and
using information systems to displace human work-
forces in both service and user support functions.
• Software Industry Evolution. Software vendors
increasingly emphasize social applications that sup-
port interaction and collaboration among users, and
also “cloud computing” and SaaS as channels for soft-
ware distribution.
In the context of CNS, the application software ven-
dor and online services industries appear indistin-
guishable. CNS firms are both software vendors
(which seek a profit through leveraging a major com-
petency in software) and service firms (which seek a
profit providing capabilities to consumers). A major
enabler for this industry convergenceis the ubiquitous
Internet and a software platform based on the Web
open standards.
Some informative examples of CNS SP’s include:
• LinkedIn (
www.linkedin.com
) is a free-for-use
professional advertising-supported networking ser-
vice. By making use of user-provided content, sub-
scribers can maintain professional contacts, keep in
touch with job opportunities, and seek expert opin-
ion. Subscription-based premium accounts provide
extended functionality.
• eBay (
www.ebay.com
) facilitates auctions and sup-
porting community activity for individuals, small
businesses, and enterprises. Users can rate sellers and
buyers, discuss and chat about topics of interest, form
interest groups, and attend online and offline events
and workshops. It charges an auction fee plus a per-
centage of the selling price.
• Facebook (
www.facebook.com
) is a free-for-use
social networking service that profits by selling adver-
tising, opinion polls of the membership, and virtual
goods. Users can create networks of “friends”, main-
tain personal profiles, create groups and events, share
photos, and use add-on applications. Third-parties
can deploy extensions utilizing an open API, and host
the extensions on their own servers.
• Wikipedia (
en.wikipedia.org
) encourages users
to collaborate on editing articles, and enables them to
view article histories and discuss articles with other
users. The result of these collective volunteer efforts
is a huge and widely available knowledge repository.
CNS is a hotbed of innovation, leveraging the
willingness of consumers (especially young ones) to
take risks and to center their lives in new online-
oriented ways. The “pure” CNS firms that we ob-
served are entrepreneurial startups, while some in-
cumbent e-commerce firms (like Amazon and eBay)
have adopted CNS ideas to enhance their existing
services. Similarly there is an opportunity to adapt
WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES - Learning from Community Networked Services
547