Open Digital Commerce as Inclusive Business Model Innovation: An Embedded Case Study of ONDC and India’s Digital Public Infrastructure
Keywords:
Digital Public Infrastructure, Platform ecosystems, Inclusive innovation, India, Open digital commerceAbstract
This paper presents a revised case-study manuscript on the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) as an important example of business model innovation in an emerging digital economy. The study argues that ONDC is better understood not simply as another e-commerce initiative but as an open market architecture built on digital public infrastructure. Using an embedded case-study approach and a wide body of secondary evidence, the paper examines how interoperable payments, modular participation, service orchestration, compliance visibility, and inclusive design combine to make open digital commerce viable. The discussion shows that ONDC changes the basis of competition. In closed marketplaces, value capture often depends on controlling discovery, data, and traffic within one firm boundary. In ONDC, by contrast, value depends more on capability differentiation across buyer applications, seller applications, logistics, payments, analytics, and customer service. The paper further shows that the developmental promise of open commerce depends on merchant enablement, multilingual and accessible interfaces, accountable service recovery, and trust-building routines rather than on technical openness alone. Because of these features, the ONDC case also has wider implications for mobile payments, tax technology, tourism services, supply-chain transparency, entrepreneurship, inclusive digital support systems, and AI-enabled service design. The paper concludes that open digital commerce can widen participation and support innovation, but only when interoperability is matched with strong governance, operational capability, and user-centered service design.
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