Abstract
E-marketplaces had brought innovative impact in supply chain in industries. This paper focused on two successful business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces in Japan, and has analysed and characterized to show their respective key enablers. We have found that a B2B e-marketplace needs to be a platform for customers so that it becomes a fundamental part of customers ’business processes. Further, we developed a methodology, called soft innovation architecture (soft IA), for formulation of service innovation strategy. This builds a concrete representation of strategy of each e-marketplace. In soft IA, we represent a birds-eye view to analyse the strategy, and then conclude their strategic superiority from the resource-based view. In the future, we will expand soft IA to investigate dynamic capability of the e-marketplace in order to clarify the nature of appropriate change of their strategies.
