Encouraging E-Commerce Collaboration Through Seed Funding Consortia

The paper reports on research focused on enhancing understanding of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce collaboration practice by investigating consortia projects, funded through the Australian government's Information Technology Online (ITOL) program, run by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE). While there were 67 projects funded in rounds one to five of the program, within which the current research occurred, the present paper concentrates on two particular projects with organisations engaged in co-opetition, that is, collaboration in the consortia among industry competitors, one more successful than the other. Both projects aimed to develop sectoral B2B e-commerce solutions that would streamline the supply chain and were envisioned as providing momentum for industry-wide adoption of messaging standards. While goals were very similar, the collaboration experiences were different. The case studies provide insights on how alliance structure and other factors influence the outcomes of e-business collaborative ventures. In particular, they reveal how the issue of structure in an e-commerce business world is important, as is the need to clarify the nature and role of consortia and responsibilities of consortia members, in order to ensure the optimum context for success.