Customer and Network Value of Mobile Services: Balancing Requirements and Strategic Interests

Designing business models for mobile services is a complex undertaking. A business model can be seen as a blueprint of four interrelated components: service offering, technical architecture, and organizational and financial arrangements. Little attention has been paid to how these different components are related to one another. Multiple actors have to balance different design requirements, strategic interests, and business logics to create a win–win situation, in which each actor has incentives to cooperate. Knowledge on the interrelation between and within the four components is needed to enhance our understanding of what constitutes a viable business model. In this paper, the connections between these components are explored by analyzing the critical design issues in business models for mobile services (e.g., targeting, branding, and customer retention in the service domain; security, quality of service and system integration in the technology domain; network governance in the organization domain; and revenue sharing in the finance domain). A causal framework is developed linking these critical design issues to expected customer value and expected network value, and hence to business model viability

Balancing Requirements For Customer Value Of Mobile Services

Designing business models for mobile services is a complex undertaking because it requires multiple actors to balance different design requirements. A business model can be seen as a blueprint of four interrelated components or domains: service, technology, organization and finance domain. Little attention has been paid to how these different domains are related to each other. This knowledge is needed to enhance our understanding of what constitutes a viable business model. In this paper the connections between two of these domains, namely service and technology domain, are explored by analysing critical design issues in business models for mobile services, i.e. targeting, creating value, branding and customer retention in the service domain, and security, quality of service, management of service profiles, system integration and accessibility in the technology domain. A causal framework is developed, which link these critical design issues to expected customer value and business model viability.

Mobile Applications for Police Officers

This paper focuses on the design parameters on the part of the stakeholders and users in the design of mobile applications for police officers. Starting from an analysis of the functional requirements of stakeholders and relevant context parameters for police officers, we find design issues that are relevant to the development of context-aware mobile applications for police officers. We collected data from the stakeholders within the police administration as well from the intended users of the service, the police officers, who were asked which specific characteristics and functions mobile applications should be supported in the actual use of mobile applications in specific situations. We found that, whereas most stakeholders are clear and almost unanimous in terms of the functionalities they require, the results for the police officers are more mixed. The use of mobile devices is highly dependent on the context in which police officers have to operate

Capturing Value from Mobile Business Models: Design Issues That Matter

Designing viable mobile business models that capture value for all organizations involved is challenging. A range of design issues could be considered, and it is often not clear how they ultimately impact the performance of the business model. This paper tests causal relations between design issues and success factors in the organization and finance domain of mobile business models, by analyzing a survey among 120 practitioners and experts in the mobile Internet services domain using structural equation modeling. We find that organizational design issues lead to more acceptable division of roles among actors, and that financial design issues impact more acceptable risks. However, profitability is influenced only indirectly by these design issues, as the relations are mediated through acceptable risks and role division. Our findings imply specific clues to organizations in the mobile domain on what design issues to address in order to satisfy specific success factors

Business Model Dynamics: A Longitudinal, Cross-sectional Case Survey

To maintain alignment with technology, regulation and market developments in the outside world, companies need to adapt their business models over time. As most literature has studied business models in a static approach, understanding is lacking on how external forces drive internal business model design choices. This paper studies which type of external drivers are most influential throughout the life cycle of business models. To do so, we surveyed 45 longitudinal case descriptions on business model dynamics of (networks of) organizations in various domains. Our results partly support our hypotheses. Market and technology drivers are most relevant in early stages of new business models, while regulation is far less important than we expected. These results mainly apply to small start-ups rather than large, established companies

Mobile Service Bundles: The Example of Navigation Services

In this paper we explore which bundles of services are attractive to users. We look specifically into bundle composition with navigation services as core, and travel and entertainment related services as complementary services. Pricing is an important criterion as well. We use conjoint measurement as a tool to assess which combination of services and price is the most attractive for users. We find that enhanced services, i.e. services that reinforce the functionality of the core navigation service are more relevant than supplementary services. Traffic information, safety alerts and parking support have positive utilities. However, pricing has a higher predictive value

Consumer Value of Context Aware and Location Based Mobile Services

Context aware services have the ability to utilize information about the user’s context to adapt services to the user’s current situation and needs. In this paper we consider users’ perceptions of the added value of location awareness and presence information in mobile services. We use an experimental design, where stimuli comprising specific bundles of mobile services were presented to groups of respondents. The stimuli showed increasing, manipulated, levels of contextawareness, including location of the user and location and availability of buddies as distinct levels. Our results indicate that simply adding context aware features to mobile services does not necessarily provide added value to users, rather the contrary. The potential added value of insight in buddies’ location and availability is offset by people’s reluctance to share location information with others. Although the average perceived value overall is rather low there exists a substantial minority that does appreciate the added context aware features. High scores on constructs like product involvement, social influence and self-expressiveness characterize this group. The results also show that context aware service bundles with utilitarian elements have a higher perceived value than bundles with hedonic elements. On the basis of the different results some guidelines for designing context aware mobile services are formulated