| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 資訊社會學研究所 === 95 === In the past, the types of industry alliance had many common characteristics in the industrial field. The strategy is to extend the industry scale and increase market shares. However, wideband-network industries especially dealing with digital content industry normally rely on extraordinarily complicate alliances, as they can not vertically integrate various value activities within an organization. This research attempts to use case study to understand the fastest growing e-learning in the core field of digital content industry. Understand the conditions of external environment uncertainty in e-learning industry. From the resource-based perspective, the e-learning industry can be identified to recognize what are its core resources and what are its shortages. Also, from the business model, it can be found that e-learning industry contains how many kinds of alliance types they are and how they choose their partners.
The results of study are found, producers don’t think the industry is mature in the external environment. The reasons include the obscure policies of government, powerlessness of action, and traditional concepts of users. The study presents e-learning industry with three types of providers, and they are content providers, services providers and technique providers. As the e-learning contents are overarching, the leading content providers and services providers accumulate experiences to differentiate from each other. But in the same time, the technique providers have keen competition in the same field. This study introduces three types of providers with their core resources as follows:
Content providers: They own substantial contents, brands, public praises and market abilities.
Services providers: They have abundant contents, user surfaces, and compatibility with other systems.
Technique providers: They have R&D skills, total solutions, modules and case management abilities.
More than that, these four case studies provide this research about these digital content industry providers are enthusiastic to be engaged into strategic alliances with other firms. To examine the leading content providers and technique providers critically, they have transferred to services providers. Analysis of the alliance structures has four dimensions: exclusive licensing, licensing, mergers acquisitions, and non-equity alliances. In one hand, if consumers are the major part in alliances structures, it represents the horizontal direction. It means that consumers must have any kinds of tubes to touch the products or services; in another hand, if companies are the major part, they should have total solutions to show up the vertical direction.
As analyzed above, owning the core resources are major survival rule of business. When e-learning providers hold domain know-how, they can horizontally expand to other industries and provide service systems.
|
|---|
