STAR is the study association of the Rotterdam School of Management. STAR’s mission is to ‘enrich the life of RSM students’. One of the projects through which STAR tries to reach that goal is the booksale. The main goal of the boosale is to offer students the cheapest books on-campus. In its current business model, STAR buys the books from Studystore, their supplier but also their competitor. Through a sponsorship contract with Studystore, STAR is able to sell the books for the lowest price on-campus. Students can pick-up their books at the University, but only at limited moments. Furthermore, as of the pick-up moments, the operational workload for STAR is quite high. Throughout a critical evaluation on the current business model and IT of STAR, the implementation of an e-book platform is investigated. Technical and strategic, the e-book platform would almost perfectly align with the business needs from STAR. However, the e-book platform would not be financial feasible and therefore the recommendation would be to find a partner to collaborate with so that STAR can make use of their platform and does not have to cover all the costs and operational workload.

In the last couple of years we have seen all kinds of applications who disrupt a certain market. You can think of platforms such as Airbnb and Uber. In the meantime, we have heard of those platforms hundreds of times, so I will not tire you with that. What I do want to talk about is the so-called gig-economy. A gig-economy is an economy in which working people can decide for theirselves when, where and and how much they work. You can see this as a flexibel labor market. Examples of companies who operate in this economy are Uber and Deliveroo, but in this blog I want to elaborate on a new platform called Ploy.

Ploy has been initiated to serve the world of hospitality. The application is meant to be there for people who want to practice more than one job: a so-called slasher, but also for companies who are in need for temporary employees. For an example you can think of a restaurant that is in need of waiters for their staff party. Where they needed to make calls to employment agencies in the past, they can now easily find people in the application.

This is another application that disrupts a certain industry.  The same thing is happening at Uber and Deliveroo and in all those industries people are afraid of their jobs, but I would say that there will arise new jobs which for instance could be a creative one where a project team constantly keeps searching for ways to innovate the new applications.

You could think that in this case an employment agency becomes unnecessary, but for instance at the back-end of this application there still need to be employees to keep track of the process or to assist in matching employees with employers.

The application has already been launched in Antwerpen and after some successful months it has been spread nationwide. Last week they started a test in Amsterdam and now they need to start building a database so that employees and employers can be matched easily.