Types of Business Webs Business webs are already being created successfully across a wide variety of industries. To map their success and learn more about how they develop, Tapscott wrote case studies of over 200 business webs. In his book Digital Capital, he grouped them according to the degree to which their value creation happens in two dimensions whether they are self organized or hierarchical, and whether the value integration within the business web is low or high. The first type of business web is an Agora, which is a self-organizing business web with low value integration. A famous Agora is eBay, where many participants bring a wide variety and quantity of goods and then negotiate prices with sellers through an auction.
Exchanges are another type of Agora.
This is restructuring many industries. For example, GM partnered with its two main competitors to create Covisint, an exchange for that industry. The next type of business web, the Aggregation, is hierarchically controlled with low value integration. The online brokers disaggregate that whole value proposition and reaggregate it on the Web, and they now have a third of all retail stock trades. It s an entire industry in upheaval as the result of a new business model.