The phase of university or student entrepreneurship is considered as critical moment of defining the entrepreneurship spirit of a person. With that being said, many university students have the idea and the dream they are pursuing but didn’t know how to make it happen as the result of lack of experience, resources and network. Business incubator comes in handy to help solving this problem. It is not until 1970s where business incubator was introduced to Taiwan to help incubating the client’s potential business. As the time goes by, currently there are 140 business incubators spread over Taiwan with their value offering now is not only helping to facilitate the business but also entering into e-commerce market as their part of business model. Gaining competitive advantage and differentiating one’s e-commerce is substantial as this industry was already matured with many players.
This case study had the purpose to explore what kind of service innovation strategy that an “internal” business incubator, Kooidea use at their e-commerce platform in order to gain competitive advantage over the industry and gain sustainability at the market. Using Pim Den Hertog’s theory of Service Innovation, the researcher try to break down each elements of the service innovation of Kooidea’s e-commerce platform in order to fully understand the strategy.
The results shows that Kooidea’s e-commerce platform was emphasizing more on the new service concept that they bring to the market. Utilizing the universities network alliances that become one of their core competencies in order to penetrate the internal university market to establish an e-commerce there which previously was non-existence. Secondly Kooidea was creating a sharing economy based e-commerce platform in which profit was not the ultimate goal. Adding this with the presence of the university alumnus and alumnae that help Kooidea by providing integrated e-commerce platform which a very low prices, makes the product offering listed at the website was guaranteed the cheapest as the CEO of Kooidea itself said. In response to the rapid growth of the e-commerce platform and the company as a general itself, Kooidea expect to continue their strategy and are expecting to receive huge growth at the near future.

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