Service-Dominant Business Model Design for Digital Innovation in Smart Mobility

In many business domains, rapid changes have occurred as a consequence of digital innovation, i.e., the application of novel information technologies to achieve specific business goals. A domain where digital innovation has great potential is smart mobility, which aims at moving around large sets of people and goods in a specific geographic setting in an efficient and effective way. So far, many innovations in this domain have concentrated on relatively isolated, technology-driven developments, such as smart route planning for individual travelers. Nice as they are, they have relatively small impact on mobility on a large scale. To achieve substantial digital innovations – for example, optimizing commuting on a city-scale – it is necessary to align the efforts and related values of a spectrum of stakeholders that need to collaborate in a common business model. To this aim, the study proposes the use of service-dominant business logic, which emphasizes the interaction of value network partners as they co-create value through collaborative processes. Moving to this paradigm has significant implications on the way business is done: the business requirements for services will change faster, and the complexity of value networks required to meet these requirements will increase further. This requires new approaches to business engineering that are grounded in the premises of service-dominant logic. The paper introduces the service-dominant business model radar (SDBM/R) as an integral component of a business engineering framework. Following a design science approach, the SDBM/R has been developed in close collaboration with industry experts and evaluated through an extensive series of hands-on workshops with industry professionals from several business domains. This paper focuses on the application and evaluation in the smart mobility domain, addressing the design of new business models for digital innovation of collaborative transport of people and goods. In summary, it contributes a novel business design approach that has an academic background and relevant practical embedding.