E-collaboration within one supply chain and its impact on firms’ innovativeness and performance

The central premise of this paper is that e-collaboration plays a major role in achieving a sustainable competitive edge. In particular, we propose to examine the relative efficiency of electronic collaboration tools and to assess their impacts on the innovativeness and performance of individual firms positioned along a single supply chain. Empirical data from both the upstream and downstream perspectives for firms positioned at different points of one supply chain suggest that e-collaboration and its impacts create a one-sided benefit for the upstream side of the chain: the overall efficiency of e-collaboration tools is higher and the impacts of e-collaboration are more beneficial when used with suppliers than when used with customers. The results also point to a stage model for implementing collaboration tools in a supply chain: efficiency is higher for e-collaboration tools that support strongly that collaboration tools can have significant impacts on the supply chain and that these tools need to be implemented progressively, both upstream and downstream, thereby yielding different and, most probably, cumulative benefits over time. An earlier version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-36).