E-business model design, classification, and measurements

Magali Dubosson-Torbay, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur
2002 Thunderbird International Business Review  
Business model" is one of the latest buzzwords in the Internet and electronic business world. This paper has the ambition to give this term a more rigorous content. The objective is threefold. The first one is to propose a theoretical e-business model framework for doing business in the Internet era. The second one is to propose a multi-dimensional classification-scheme for eBusiness Models, as opposed to the actual tendency in academic literature to use two-dimensional classifications. The
more » ... l objective is to define critical success factors, based on a field study in order to find out and compare the performance indicators used by e-business firms which are competing with similar businesses models. HEC Lausanne 2 There have been several attempts to classify all the business models emerging over and over with the coming of the New Economy in order to understand how e-companies are making or not making money. Some companies have seen their business model highly publicized such as the reverse auction model of Priceline or online grocery model of Peapod. But is it all so clear ? For instance, ebay.com might be typical of an Agora B-Web (Tapscott and al.) but at the same time, ebay.com might be considered as being a merchandiser online (transaction.net) or an auction broker (Rappa). All of them are considering the same object but from different perspectives. Is there a better or a worse way to classify the business models? Are they allowing comparisons? Do they help to understand the strategies of the different actors within a same category, for instance the online grocery stores ? Are they explaining why some of them benefit from better financial figures ? Nowadays new business models do not finish to emerge in electronic commerce and can become a major stake in the e-business game ((Maître and Aladjidi (1999) , Kalakota (1999)). It is even possible to patent them in some countries (Pavento (1999)! Understanding the new business models and helping to design and measure them are important research issues, not so well covered until now. The next section presents a definition and the components of a business model as a new framework. The section 2 suggests to use this framework to classify and compare the business models. Finally, we show through examples how to translate the core processes of the business models into a set of relevant measures for each component of the adopted framework.
doi:10.1002/tie.1036 fatcat:urxk2d4jsranni2qgqqpfk34rm