Page - 165 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

2.2 Digital Business Due to new technological innovations, new ways of conducting business, con- necting, and collaborating have been established. The new technologies, such as social media, are building bridges between people, whichmakes connecting with each other much easier. Digital technologies also have challenged companies forcing them to continuously innovate in order to achieve competitiveness in this new landscape as business models evolve and companies experience immense pressure to stay on track (Fenwick 2016). Business models have changed, and companies are challenged to keep up. Digital business is about the creation of new value chains and business opportunities that traditional businesses cannot offer. It is the creation of new businesses where the lines between digital and physical worlds are blurred or not evenvisible.Forexample,most start-ups thesedaysaredigitalbusinesses that solve aproblemor have a solution tomakeday-to-day tasks easier andmore convenient. Examples of digital start-ups that have become successful are companies such as Uber,whichmakes it easier togo toplaces fora lowerprice thanconventionalcabs; or Airbnb, which provides a place for people who want to rent their house and peoplewho are looking to rent a house for the vacation of other purposes.Both of these companies are digital businesses and do not have any physical products. Wirtz (2018) defines digital business as the initiation, transaction, andmainte- nance of the service exchange process between economic partners through infor- mation technology.Someof themost important elements in thedigital business are mobile technologies, social media platforms, analytics, and cloud computing technologies (Fischer and Lopez 2019). Some examples that make these of key importance for digital business are that mCommerce has an increasing part in the total of electronic commerce, social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Face- book have changed the ways in which people meet and collaborate and big data analytics enable businesses to uncover hidden patterns, which lead to reduction of costs and better decision making. Overall, the digital business helps to eliminate barriers that now exist among industry segments while creating new value chains and business opportunities that traditional businesses cannot offer (Fenwick 2016). However, digital businesses also face challenges such as pervasive connectivity, which challenges companies with their speed of product launches and decision making (Bharadwaj et al. 2013). Fast product launches by digital natives such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon are putting pressure on companies to introduce their products fast.Furthermore, the sameplatformsandbigdataposechallenges to react in real time as well as to access, process, and analyze data that become available in a digitally connected world. Such developments enable hyper-connections among customers, companies, processes, and things. Taken together, digital contributes to the hypercompetitive digital economy. With hypercompetition, no competitive advantage is sustainable in the long term (D’Aveni 2010), which emphasizes a need for businesses and individuals to be creative and continuously reinvent and innovate. 170 E. Smailhodžić andD. Berberović