Internship

This is a joint project between Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland and Faculty of Economics in Rijeka, Croatia, founded by Croatian National Scientific Foundation. The project is a part of post-doc research conducted by as2con member Nataša Golik Klanac who is the project coordinator.

The aim of the project is to define and describe value of websites for multiple users in business-to-business relationships in the context of the shipping industry. The shipping industry is of immense importance for the European and the world’s economy. To allow efficient interaction in the industry, the actors in the industry employ a variety of websites and the use of the internet continuously increases, facing also a lot of problems. Despite that, research on value of the internet for the companies in the industry is lacking. In order to develop websites that will be used by the companies in the shipping industry i.e. that will be of value to them, we need to understand how website characteristics drive benefits or incur sacrifices to the users. 

The empirical part involves four qualitative case studies of ship-owner companies. Their perceived value of websites was captured through personal interviews. Results point at a number of benefits as well as at an array of potential sacrifices of the use. Moreover, exact conflicts in perceptions between ship-owners and shipyards are elicited.The project makes thus contributions both to the literature on value and business-to-business websites and to the use of websites in practice.