Challenges of Global Trade and the Transfer to e-Enabled Business Models in the Swiss Socks Market

Recent research has acknowledged the need to shift from the traditional one to one e-enabled business model to a many-to-many one. With the introduction of the Internet in the 1990’s companies such as Blacksocks SA and Jacob Rohner AG suddenly found a mean and the environment to think about e-enabling their business models or even start a company purely based on that existence. Building on a wide range of analysis of the terms business models and e-business models, e-business models to our understanding depict a company’s capability to apply, use or even exist throughout the presence of an e-enabled environment. The internet itself is being seen as a family of tools, methodologies and concepts to represent the e-enabled environment. Currie and others are drawing the attention to value creation from e-business models and Joyce and Winch discuss the evolvement of a business model to become e-enabled (Currie, 2004). In contrast to their key findings, the EU research project ITAIDE and the underlying business cases in this paper go beyond. The argumentation and the conclusion we will infer in the paper show that e-enabled business models are much more than applying tools, methodologies through the simple existence of the Internet. Further than the reach of companies, collaborative and decent research environments such as ITAIDE allow companies and ecosystems to adopt from the research findings and transfer those into applicable and scalable e-business models.