Abstract

With the advent of the information age, shrinking product lifecycles and intense competition, organizations continuously seek to renew their business models to exploit new market opportunities. Existing literature suggests that advances in IT and the rise of corporate-wide IT platforms facilitate the use of IT resources across the organization and can drive the evolution of business models. However, we still know little about the role of IT in enabling successful business models. This study investigates the relationship between corporate IT platforms and business model evolution. We examine the case of DHL Express to understand how its efforts to build a corporate IT platform influenced the company’s business model. Drawing on insights from prior literature and findings from the DHL case, we discuss evidence that corporate IT platforms enable business model evolution to the extent that they generate digital options that can be exercised by managers to renew value propositions for customers.

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