M. Fritz, et al. / International Food and Agribusiness Management Review Volume 7, Issue 1, 2004
Development Strategies for Success
This section takes a closer look to trade platforms successful in the 2000 / 2002
period and their areas and elements of evolution and development. An analysis
following the framework discussed in section 2.3 could build on data from nine
platforms with successful operations during the analysis period and has revealed
seven predominant platform development strategies. These lines are those platform
elements where most of the changes have occurred during the period 2000 / 2002.
The successful platforms usually followed several development strategies
simultaneously.
The development lines fall into two categories, ‘primary development strategies’
that were followed by the majority of the platforms, and ‘secondary development
strategies’ followed by at least one quarter of them (Table 3). The primary
development strategies distinguish between two different groups of initiatives:
• initiatives that deal with platform cooperation on the joint use of specific
platform features or the joint development and use of standards and
• initiatives that deal with platform improvements.
Table 3: Development Strategies of Successful Platforms
|
Primary development strategies________ |
Secondary development strategies |
|
Cooperation with other platforms Sharing of features Joint development of standards Improvement of trading functionalities |
Technology partnerships International expansion Increased competence of personnel |
Cooperation for Sharing Specific Features
Cooperation initiatives for the joint use of specific features occur primarily between
comprehensive platforms dealing with a broad range of products on one side and
specialized, small platforms that are particularly well adapted to the trading
processes of specific goods on the other side. The comprehensive platforms use the
specific technology provided by the specialized platforms, the specialized platforms
benefit from the increase in transactions brought to them. Examples include WWRE
and GNX, large retailer consortium platforms that perform their transactions in
perishables on the Agribuys and iTradeNetworks platforms, respectively.
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