Weak Signals and Wild Cards Leading to Transformative Disruption: A Consumer Delphi Study on the Future of e-Commerce in China

Abstract

The future of businesses is not only orchestrated by emerging trends and megatrends but also to a greater extent struck by surprising events. With the accelerating presence of high-tech innovations and smart technologies, business activities are exposed to an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Any unexpected changes in the environment could lead to the malfunction or even collapse of a company, a business, or even an industry. Discerning the seeds of change and anticipating the potential disruptions in the external environment is a precondition for avoiding potential risks and threats. The present study contributes to the conceptual and methodological discussion of disruptive transformation by identifying, analyzing, and interpreting the potential disruptive factors in the external business environment. The venture is undertaken through the lens of probing into the dynamism of China’s e-commerce industry, considering its growing influence both domestically and abroad. Any unexpected disruptions would result in a significant ripple effect on interrelated businesses, industries, and even economies. The research adopts a combined mode of qualitative and quantitative methods in the form of horizon scanning and a Consumer Delphi study. Horizon scanning collects futures signals indicating the seeds of change (i.e., weak signals) and potential disruptions (i.e., wild cards), whereas Delphi study solicits the evaluations on the degree of likelihood and impact of the collected factors from an expert panel. As a result, twenty-seven potential disruptive factors are discovered, categorized, estimated, and discussed.