Business Models - An Information Systems Research Agenda

The business model concept, although a relatively new topic for research, has garnered growing attention over the past decade. Whilst it has been robustly defined, the concept has so far at- tracted very little substantive research. In the context of the wide-spread dig- itization of businesses and society at large, the logic inherent in a business model has become critical for business success and, hence, a focus for aca- demic inquiry. The business model con- cept is identified as the missing link between business strategy, processes, and Information Technology (IT). The authors argue that the BISE community offers distinct and unique competen- cies (e.g., translating business strate- gies into IT systems, managing busi- ness and IT processes, etc.) that can be harnessed for significant research con- tributions to this field. Within this re- search gap three distinct streams are delineated, namely, business models in IT industries, IT enabled or digital business models, and IT support for developing and managing business models. For these streams, the cur- rent state of the art, suggest critical re- search questions, and suitable research methodologies are outlined

The impact of Digital Platforms on Business Models: an empirical investigation on innovative start-ups

Digital platforms have the ability to connect people, organizations and resources with the aim of facilitating the core interactions between businesses and consumers as well as assuring a greater efficiency for the business management. New business concepts, such as innovative start-ups, are therefore created based on innovation, scalability and the relationships within the community around them. The purpose of this work is to deeply understand the evolution of business models brought by innovative and dynamic companies operating through online platforms. In order to achieve the objectives set, an exploratory multiple-case study was designed based on in-depth structured interviews. The aim was to conduct a mixed analysis, in order to rely both on qualitative and quantitative data. The structured interview protocol was therefore designed to collect and then analyse data concerning the company profile and managers’ perspectives on the phenomenon of interest. The interview protocol was submitted in advance and then face-to-face interviews were carried out with the following professional figures: Chief Executive Officer (CEO), General Manager, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Marketing Manager and Developers. Collected data were analysed and processed through the Canvas Business Model in order to clearly outline similarities and differences among the sample. Results can be considered under two viewpoints. On the one hand, this work provides a detailed overview of the companies interviewed, according to the dimensions of: reference market dynamics, type and number of customers, scalability. On the other one, they allow to identify some success patterns regarding key activities, key resources, channel mix strategy, costs management, value proposition, customer segmentation, key partners and the way to obtain revenues. Results from the multiple-case study with 15 Italian start-ups provide interesting insights by comparing the innovative business models developed and highlighting key differences and similarities. verall, the start-ups analyzed, operating in several sectors, showed great growth prospects and the possibility to create value for their customers through innovative products and services offered through digital platforms

Towards comparable business model concepts: resource description framework (RDF) schemas for semantic business model representations

Scholars have demonstrated that business model (BM) choices have a significant impact on the success of products, innovations and organizations. However, knowledge about key elements of BMs is disseminated across a large body of literature and builds on different conceptualizations. We take a step back and provide a new approach to formalize BM concepts and related BM knowledge, based on concepts from the semantic web. We introduce and evaluate the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a data model for comparable and extensible BM descriptions. Moreover, we use this new perspective to analyze commonalities and differences between BM concepts, to reflect critically on the process of translating concepts to RDF and evaluate its relevance for BM design practice

DIGITAL SKILLS, ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN RESOURCES: A REVIEW

In the last twenty years digital technologies started to be used more commonly by companies all around the world and these technologies started to transform all processes of manufacturing and other industries. Considering this transformation process, the objective of this study was to identify the major technological trends and their impact on the organizational behavior referring to the change in the employment trends all over the world in industrial level. In the paper the digitalization and the digital trends are identified, the digital professional skills are analyzed and the trends for organizational behavior are focused. The descriptive study shows us that digitalization is not only transforming the national economies and industries but also has and will have a huge impact on organizationa

Improving Business Model Configuration through a Question-based Approach

In the competitive context of agile innovation cycles, it is necessary for companies to construct their business model leading them to a creative strategy innovation. There already are a number of methods to create business models, many of which are also implemented in software. However, these are often unstructured, unguided and static, resulting in diverse and heterogeneous business models. This complicates automated evaluation allowing recommendations. The aim is to develop a question-based tool yielding for comparable and, thus, analyzable business models based on a developed standardized taxonomy. The questions guiding through the configurator were derived from this taxonomy. A tool was developed implementing the question-based concept. User tests were conducted as part of an evaluation showing promising results concerning usability in addition to the already achieved standardization

DIGITAL SKILLS, ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN RESOURCES

In the last twenty years digital technologies started to be used more commonly by companies all around the world and these technologies started to transform all processes of manufacturing and other industries. Considering this transformation process, the objective of this study was to identify the major technological trends and their impact on the organizational behavior referring to the change in the employment trends all over the world in industrial level. In the paper the digitalization and the digital trends are identified, the digital professional skills are analyzed and the trends for organizational behavior are focused. The descriptive study shows us that digitalization is not only transforming the national economies and industries but also has and will have a huge impact on organizational behavior within the enterprises by bringing new skills and expectations to the workplace

THE CIRCULAR EFFECTS OF POPULARITY INFORMATION AND ELECTRONIC WORD-OF-MOUTH ON CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING: EVIDENCE FROM A CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM

Potential backers of crowdfunding campaigns often need to make investment decisions based on limited information, as the project they invest in has not come into existence at the time the campaign is running. As a consequnce, other evidence for the trustworthiness and quality of a crowdfunding campaign, such as popularity information and electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM), are becoming increasingly important. In order to identify interdependencies between these influntial factors and the backers´ decisions, we deploy the Panel Vector Auto-Regression (PVAR) methodology to estimate impulse-response functions that depict the response of one variable to a shock in another variable. Preliminary results from Kickstarter suggest that a positive shock in popularity information is associated with a higher number of campaign backers in the next period. The same is tru for eWOM within the social networks Twitter and Facebook. Despite strong feedback cycles within platforms, our preliminary results show little evidence for cross-platform effects between social media and the number of backers and vice versa. First results show that our current understanding of the impact of popularity information and eWOM on decision making is far from conclusive. We will further validate these findings by extending the dataset, both in time and scope

Business Model Innovation in European SMEs: some preliminary findings

Business Models have been on the research agenda since the emergence of ecommerce and ebusiness in late last century. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the concept, ontologies, taxonomies and approach in the field of strategic management, information systems, digital business and high-tech entrepreneurship research, empirical research either in the form of cases studies or quantitative research is largely missing or based on research that is not preliminary designed to understand BMs and their impact. This is even more the case for BM Innovation and BM research for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we present our very first results of a sample of European SMEs and how they deal with BM Innovation. Our research shows that 35% of the SMEs in our sample are involved in BMI. The research also show that changes in BMs most of the time are related to a combination of multiple innovations at the same time like entering a new market, changing their eco-system, change pricing strategy, or dealing with changes in IT

Towards increased business model comprehension – principles for an advanced business model tool

Business modelling is recognized as an important concept to make company strategies more explicit and to compare alternatives combined with their translation to the operational layer. Typically, busi-ness modelling is performed by a group of experts building on established frameworks like the Busi-ness Model Canvas. In a subsequent step, different stakeholders in a company should build upon and work with the defined business models, thus, comprehension is critical. However, this is challenging from a practical point of view and existing research has not addressed the issue of business model comprehension. In order to close this research gap and to increase users’ business model comprehen-sion, we propose an advanced business model tool and an experimental design in this research-in-progress paper. Following the design science approach, we derive a first set of meta-requirements and design principles and present an advanced business model tool instantiation. The presented tool should contribute to an increased business model comprehension by providing semantic relationships and extended business performance indicators. Finally, we present a set of testable hypotheses and the research design for an experimental tool evaluation. With this research we intend to provide a solu-tion to the problem of business model comprehension and contribute to the design knowledge base of business model tools