Introduction
The report is based on Airbnb which is an American vacation rental online marketplace and it is situated in San Francisco, California, united states. The company offers and arranges the required services for lodging, home stays, tourism experiences. The main purpose of this report is to analyze an innovation and technology that may disrupt the whole market and also evaluate its effects which are created on the company.
Analyze an innovation or technology that disrupted the market
Airbnb is an online market place that lets people rent out their property or spare rooms for guests for any important function or occasion. For this, they take around 3% commission on every booking from the customers, and between 6 to 12 % is taken from guests. This section covers analyzing an innovative technology that disrupts the marketplace. The idea of disruptive marketing comes from a concept which is known as disruptive innovation. It is where a technology displaces something well established from the market by evaluating the user’s needs and fill the required gap that the other technology failed to do it. In this, Airbnb Company also comes with the disruptive innovative technology in which they are providing online rental services for room to their guest (Laurell, et. al., 2016). This is beneficial for the users where they can easily book the room as per their budget and select the best suitable room which they want in a simple process to be followed. In such companies, an online booking system may provide them major benefits and profits for the reservation of rooms.
This will assist in developing trust, transparency, and easiness and build a direct connection with the clients with the help of using this technology. This will also provide comfort to the users who need to book rooms for their friends and they are not present in the respective area. Apart from this, online business is playing an important role in the current business operations where they can easily offer desired services to the clients in a better manner (Lee, et. al., 2015). Airbnb adopts this innovation or technology which helps them in increasing growth and goodwill in a large market area. The company provides 24/7 operations and services which makes it easy for the clients is to book the required room whenever they want. With the help of online rental services for rooms, the business management manages the system in a better way as it does not deal with manual actions or a person. This will reduces work pressure and burden upon the management staff member who handles all the bookings and dealings (Li, et. al., 2018).
Evaluate the effects that disruptive technology created
It is analyzed that Airbnb adopts new technology or innovation activities in which they start online rental services for rooms. The disruptive technologies have created the potential; impact on growth, employment, and inequality by developing new markets and various business practices. For this, they need new products, skilled employees, and infrastructure. As per the case of Airbnb, they are ready to use online rental services in which they offer effective room booking facilities to their clients. But this may affect company performance and operation (Hynynen, et. al., 2016). To implement such technology or innovation, Airbnb needs to hire some skilled and experienced employees who know how to maintain and manage the online business where it requires handling all the transactions and dealings. Along with this, the company needs to focus on adopting the latest and advanced technology that helps in properly conducting online booking of the room.
To handle new technology, Airbnb should conduct training and development sessions where all the new and existing workers attend this session and learn how to use such technology. This will help in increasing their knowledge and competences so that they can simply manage the business regulations and functions effectively. If the company does not adopt technology that may help in properly manage the entire online business system then this can directly impact their growth and performance level (Kakar, et. al., 2018). In this situation, the business concern can also lose customers when it does not deliver the best services to them in a given time. Such a form of effects can create by technology while the company does not effectively manage and maintained such changing operations.
Barriers that the innovation had to overcome
The innovation for providing online services for rental rooms will have to overcome to have a full effect on the industry. The disruptive innovation of online services for renting rooms needs to deal with a variety of issues in the business activities which can impact on the consumers of the company. The Airbnb needs to overcome the barriers such as lack of trust of consumers on online services, lack of favorable reviews on the online platform for rental rooms, online payment frauds on customers from a fraudulent organization on the name of Airbnb, and many more (Cheng, et. al., 2019). These are some of the barriers which need to be dealt with by Airbnb for having full effect of the online services being provided for the customers of the company. The consumers trust on the online services for rental room services should be gained by the company to make them realize the benefits which will be provided by the company on using the innovation of the industry (Meleo, et. al., 2016).
The company needs to make their payment methods more flexible which will provide the customers to make payments from the modes which are more comfortable for the specific consumers. The online services are not very adoptive by the elder generation and they need to be provided with a workshop on the uses of online services for offering rooms on rent for the various consumers. There is a high requirement for the Airbnb Company to provide the methods which will prevent the frauds in payments and other procedures of the online rental room services (Dove, 2018). The customer’s loyalty maintenance is very difficult on the online services as there are a lot of companies and platforms available which offers similar services and products for the consumers. The company needs to maintain its existing customers by providing them with some perks and benefits which will help them in having a full effect on the industry to lead with the great range of customers. The barriers need to be overcome by the company to have an impact on the services for online room rentals in the whole industry.
Potential ethical implication of adopting/ not adopting the disruptive technology
The potential of the ethical implication of adopting the disruptive technology or innovation is the case in which the existing technology or innovation gets disrupts from the new market created by the use of the innovation by the company. The new market will attain the market-leading firms, products, and alliances to create a new world for dealing with innovation and creating another range of customers (Airbnb.co, 2020). The adopting of disruptive innovation of online rental facilities will lead towards the development of the new market which will destroy the working criteria of the existing technology and will help in gaining the new market place for the customers and alliances of the company. If it is not adopted then the existing technology will need to face the new world which is not possible for the company to deal with the modern ways of working for the customers to provide the desired products and services. The new online technology will provide growth and development for the Airbnb Company as the new generation is prone to work on mobile phones and computing devices to gain services from various companies.
The ethical implication has the potential to carry forward the new innovative technology which leads them towards gaining a new phase for business activities and providing the rental room services for their existing customers and also for the latest customers who are getting potential from the online services of the Airbnb (Brummer, 2015). The adoption of the latest technology for providing the online rental services of room’s availability will create a new market space for the Airbnb Company which will lead the company towards the growth and development of the company. The customers will be able to rent the room by using the online services in which they just have to click on the rent button to rent a room. The online services will provide ease and comfort for the whole process and gain benefits for the company in various ways. The company needs to adopt the innovation which will disrupt the existing market as there will be new possibilities for the company to lead.
Conclusion
From the above-concluded report, it has been concluded that Airbnb gains profitability and high growth while conducting online rental services for the room. This technology helps in providing benefits to the business as well as a comfortable situation for customers. The report discusses the effect of technology, potential impact, and barriers in a better way.
References
Airbnb.co, (2020). About Airbnb. Airbnb.co. [Online]. Available at: https://www.airbnb.co.in/ [Accessed: 11th September 2020]
Brummer, C. (2015). Disruptive technology and securities regulation. Fordham L. Rev., 84, 977.
Cheng, X., Fu, S., Sun, J., Bilgihan, A., & Okumus, F. (2019). An investigation on online reviews in sharing economy driven hospitality platforms: A viewpoint of trust. Tourism Management, 71, 366-377.
Dove, G. (2018). Language as a disruptive technology: abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1752), 20170135.
Hynynen, K., & Jones, R. M. (2016). Image-guided ultrasound phased arrays are a disruptive technology for non-invasive therapy. Physics in Medicine & Biology, 61(17), R206.
Kakar, V., Voelz, J., Wu, J., & Franco, J. (2018). The visible host: Does race guide Airbnb rental rates in San Francisco?. Journal of Housing Economics, 40, 25-40.
Laurell, C., & Sandström, C. (2016). Analysing Uber in social media—disruptive technology or institutional disruption?. International journal of innovation management, 20(05), 1640013.
Lee, D., Hyun, W., Ryu, J., Lee, W. J., Rhee, W., & Suh, B. (2015, February). An analysis of social features associated with room sales of Airbnb. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 219-222).
Li, M., Porter, A. L., & Suominen, A. (2018). Insights into relationships between disruptive technology/innovation and emerging technology: A bibliometric perspective. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 129, 285-296.
Meleo, L., Romolini, A., & De Marco, M. (2016, May). The sharing economy revolution and peer-to-peer online platforms. The case of Airbnb. In International Conference on Exploring Services Science (pp. 561-570). Springer, Cham.