Technological and conceptual accessibility to measure the soundness of an e-business idea

The purpose of this paper is to present two new parameters that aim to support the selection phase of a new e-business idea in order to evaluate its soundness and effectiveness. The paper explains the reasons for the creation of these new parameters, the identification of the measures and the metrics to evaluate them, and presents the final results and their meaning. This new methodology should integrate the traditional business analysis concepts through the identification of new useful measures that are specific to the e-business field. The parameters identified have been called "Conceptual Accessibility" and "Technological Accessibility." In order to tune the new parameters and to execute all the needed subjective evaluations a user panel of 100 potential users was selected and utilized. In order to assess the soundness of the identified parameters and to give a definition and a metric that will allow a quantitative evaluation of the idea the reference user panel gave evaluations on an enterprise reference group of well known e-business ventures. All the components of the enterprise reference group are examples of successful implementation of e-business ideas. The users in the panel were carefully selected in order to represent the expected target of the new e-business idea to be evaluated. In the final sections of the paper we finally discuss the results and underline the advantages of this methodology.