This chapter seeks to assess the relationship between Web infrastructure and Internet-based innovation as sources of business value. To respond to this challenge, a conceptual model, grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) is developed. To test hypotheses, a large sample consisting of Spanish firms is employed. The results show that, as hypothesized, Web infrastructure is not positively related to business value and that Internet-based innovation has a positive significant impact on business value. In addition, the results show no significant complementarity between Web infrastructure and Internet-based innovation.
The RBV of the firm (Barney, 1991; Schulze, 1992; Hoopes et al, 2003) is a well established theoretical framework from the strategic management domain which provides a solid foundation to differentiate between IT resources and IT capabilities and study their separate influences on performance (Santhanam and Hartono, 2003).Based on this analysis, Bharadwaj (2000) suggested that if firms can combine IT related resources to create unique IT capabilities, they can improve their performance. IS researchers have followed this consideration of IT capability because competition may easily result in the duplication of investment in IT resources, and companies can purchase the same hardware and software to remove competitive advantage (Santhanam and Hartono, 2003). In this respect, research offers a useful distinction between IT resources and IT capabilities. The former is asset-based, while the latter comprises a mixture of assets formed around the productive use of IT.