This paper analyses business process models relevant to supply chain management, and reveals that these models build in a new type of coordination mechanism, which enables agile coordination against rapid changes of markets. This coordination mechanism is innovative in introducing the concepts of uncertainty and time into the traditional price mechanism.

We propose a design method of effective business process models of supply chain management based on the new coordination mechanism.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between change of industry model and innovation of business model through case analysis of information goods industry.

The paper proposes a concept of “Industry Model” as an analytical framework. Industry Model is a model of industrial structure, which is formed as a combining result of creation and pursuing of the business model by each organization. On the other hand, “Business Model” is a model of business activities by each organization. The Industry Model can be analyzed by three sub-models which are “Value-added Model”, “Division of Work Model” and “Incentive Model”. While business model is constrained by industry model, an innovation of business model creates fluctuations in the industry model, or sometimes it gives a changing trigger to the industry model. After being shaked, the industry model would gain stability again though the process of positive agreement or passive accommodation among the industrial players.

The paper analyzes the information goods industry as a case study. The industry is faced to the environmental changes brought by Broadband Internet. Information goods is classified into “Contents Goods”, “Transaction Goods” and “Tool Goods” based on the way of usage of the goods. It is shown that the process of changes from the old industry model to the new one is not the same among the three above goods.

Utilizing an approach of law and institutional economics, this paper argues the business model of the copyrighted digital goods under the copyright law as cultural creation protection law. Classifying the business model by the information flow among economic actors, the author evaluates such business models in the view of implementation procedure and potential business risk. By the comparison, transaction-typed business model seems to be still effective because of the development of DRM technology and legal regulations. Moreover, extending Cohen (2000)’s argument, the author classifies three types of price model for copyrighted digital goods such as monopoly price model, price discrimination model and price fluctuation model, and performs the consumer surplus analysis and evaluation of economic effectiveness for them. By the transaction analysis of used video game market and historical analysis of legal judgment for video game as copyrighted digital goods, the price fluctuation model seems to be most economically effective and legally conformable.

For a business model invention to be patented, a technical element is necessary regarding the newness and non-triviality of the corresponding business process. The purpose of this paper is to deepen our understanding of business model patents, and to propose a classification method that positions the newness and non-triviality of inventions. This classification method uses a process flow diagram to describe the newness of a business process, and notes the changes in its information flow diagram to capture its information technology aspects. We investigate 80 internet-related business model patent applications open to public in Japan, and develop the categories of the proposed classification by extracting, sorting, and integrating the keywords to represent all the applications. As the categories for the changes in information flow, we have found seven patterns. They are new path, medium change, information increase, information intermediary, physical intermediary, database, and mixed forms. As the categories for the change in process flow, we have identified six patterns, which are addition, deletion, alternative means, permutation, alternative function, and permutation/alternative function.