סמינר באסטרטגיה ניהולית

Dr. Achim Oberg   ( Institute for SME Research at the University of Mannheim, Germany)

Existing research on sharing organizations categorizes them by asking what kinds of industries they affect and what types of goods or services are shared and exchanged. What is not yet understood is how these organizations operate, this is how they propose, create and capture value. We thus know little about the emergent business models in the sharing economy, although they seem to be an important source of variation. But how can we measure similarities and differences between business models of sharing organizations and how can we identify types of business models? We propose a semantic network approach which we have developed to analyze organizational forms to answer this question. To do so, we disassemble business models of individual sharing organizations into sets of co-occurring features and codes. The resulting co-occurrence networks can then be compared to identify “similarity clusters” – which can be interpreted as precursors of organizational forms and business models – and to measure differences between sharing organizations, between organizations and clusters, and between different clusters. We use data on sharing organizations in Germany which we collected in autumn/winter 2016. We thereby identify two similarity clusters and a mediating cluster. Comparing individual organizations with these similarity clusters reveals nuanced variations within clusters and interesting cases of cluster-spanning hybridity. With these insights we contribute to develop a deeper and fine-grained understanding of what the sharing economy is.