Abstract
Businesses are consistently facing new challenges. Today, business needs to understand the technological revolution, which is fundamentally changing the way business operates implementing new processes, new business models and new strategies (Aagaard, Andersen & Presser, 2019). The 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) is impacting the way businesses operate with technologies and digitisation that is revolutionising everything and creating change throughout the business environment.
The changes in business models like Airbnb and Uber are technology-driven demand (TDD) business models that have become household names within a few years.
Understanding the intricate associations between technology, business process and societal demand are important for business sustainability. The Business Idea (BI) model was developed by van der Heijden (1996:69) to demonstrate that invention of products and services satisfies the evolving demands of society, i.e., that technology will only develop when customers recognise their need for it (van der Heijden, 1996). TDD suggests the alternative: that creating customer demand can be driven by technological innovation.
The phenomenon of TDD in business and the association between TDD and the business process is a complex one that can affect all structures of a business. How these associations evolve, and manifest is the focus of this study.
The methodology used to develop an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon is grounded theory, a qualitative research approach. A literature review was performed to gain understanding of the body of knowledge related to the broader subject of Technology in business. A case study was conducted using a single company, collecting data by open-ended interviews with selected participants within a global organisation. An interpretivist paradigm was used to understand the human experience related to the phenomenon by interviewing participants. The school of thought was constructivism and systems thinking. As the business environment becomes increasingly more complex and chaotic there is a need for ways such as systems thinking, to deal with the complexity, this paper makes use of the systems thinking school of thought to unravel the complexity of the real-world concepts and systems focused on in this research. Systems thinking is the science of dealing with interdependent sets of variables and it seeks to develop complex causal explanations
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rather than linear sequential or hierarchical explanations of the variables and their interdependencies (Checkland, 1981, 1985; Jackson, 2003, 2006; Richmond, 1994; Meadows, 2008; Plate, 2010; Senge, 1990; Sterman, 2003; Sweeney & Sterman, 2000).
The findings of this study are that technology is fundamentally changing the way business is done, impacting the business model, the business strategy and having a significant impact on business processes. The fast pace of technology developments has given rise to dynamic markets and dynamic company outputs, where companies are using new technologies to develop innovative products and services that integrate technologies, and digital technologies to develop new business models, processes, and structures (Jurgielewicz, 2019).
The development of new technologies has resulted in companies developing smart systems, where 4IR systems are used in production facilities, sensors are used in systems to monitor system parameters, and remote and mobile systems are used to communicate the information – all creating intelligent systems (Závadská & Závadský, 2018).
Technologies that are fused with big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) combined with the ability of technologies to compute using the information and big data, is the source of technology being used to collaborate to create ideas and new products and services that are innovative, creating demand for business.