Jonas Hedman

The business model concept: theoretical underpinnings and empirical illustrations

The business model concept is becoming increasingly popular within IS, management and strategy literature. It is used within many fields of research, including both traditional strategy theory and in the emergent body of literature on e-business. However, the concept is often used independently from theory, meaning model components and their interrelations are relatively obscure. Nonetheless, we believe that the business model concept is useful in explaining the relation between IS and strategy. This paper offers an outline for a conceptual business model, and proposes that it should include customers and competitors, the offering, activities and organisation, resources and factor market interactions. The causal inter-relations and the longitudinal processes by which business models evolve should also be included. The model criticises yet draws on traditional strategy theory and on the literature that addresses business models directly. The business model is illustrated by an ERP implementation in a European multi-national company.

The new normal

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted Address competition and collaboration in the payment ecosystem.Develop the Mobile Payment Market Collusion (MPMC) framework.Integrating theories of market collusion with the literatures on business and technology ecosystems.Validating the framework by a case study of technology-based market collusion in mobile payment ecosystem. The introduction of mobile payments is one of many innovations that are changing the payment market. This change involves new payment service providers entering this lucrative market, and meanwhile, the existing stakeholders are trying to defend their oligopolistic positions. The mobile payment market cooperation (MPMC) framework in this article shows how the digitalization of payments, as a technology innovation, affects the competition and collaboration among traditional and new stakeholders in the payment ecosystem at three levels of analysis. We do this by integrating theories of market cooperation with the literatures on business and technology ecosystems. The MPMC framework depicts technology-based market cooperation strategies in the context of recent battles in the mobile payments ecosystem. In these battles, the competitors can use technology either in defensive build-and-defend strategies to protect market position, or in offensive battering-ram strategies for ecosystem entry or position improvement. Successful strategies can lead to: (1) Ricardian rents, based on operational efficiency advantages traceable to the firms position relative to suppliers and monopoly power; and (2) Bainian rents, resulting from the extent the firm is able to resist price competition in the market. We validate the framework that we propose through three case studies of technology-based market cooperation in the mobile payments ecosystem.

The adoption of hyped technologies: a qualitative study

The introduction of new consumer technology is often greeted with declarations that the way people conduct their lives will be changed instantly. In some cases, this might create hype surrounding a specific technology. This article investigates the adoption of hyped technology, a special case that is absent in the adoption literature. The study employs a consumer research perspective, specifically the theory of consumption values (TCV), to understand the underlying motives for adopting the technology. In its original form, TCV entails five values that influence consumer behavior: functional, social, epistemic, emotional and conditional. The values catch the intrinsic and extrinsic motives influencing behavior. Using a qualitative approach that includes three focus groups and 60 one-on-one interviews, the results of the study show that emotional, epistemic and social values influence the adoption of hyped technologies. Contrary to expectations, functional value, which is similar to the widely used information system constructs of perceived usefulness and relative advantage, has little impact on the adoption of technologies that are surrounded with significant hype. Using the findings of the study, this article proposes a model for investigating and understanding the adoption of hyped technologies. This article contributes to the literature by (1) focusing on the phenomenon of hyped technology, (2) introducing TCV, a consumer research-based theoretical framework, to enhance the understanding of technology adoption, and (3) proposing a parsimonious model explaining the adoption of hyped technology.

Three Strategies for Green IT

An investigation of green IT in 14 Danish companies identifies three strategies: storefront focuses on external presentation, tuning involves simple changes for improved efficiency, and redesign reinvents the company to leverage green ITs potential.

Time-out/time-in: the dynamics of everyday experiential computing devices

In everyday life, the role of computing devices alternates between the ordinary and mundane, the un‐reflected and the extraordinary. To better understand the process through which the relationship between computing devices, users and context changes in everyday life, we apply a distinction between time‐in and time‐out use. Time‐in technology use coincides and co‐exists within the flow of ordinary life, while time‐out use entails ‘taking time out’ of everyday life to accomplish a circumscribed task or engage reflectively in a particular experience. We apply a theoretically informed grounded approach to data collected through a longitudinal field study of smartphone users during a 6‐month period. We analysed the data based on the concept of time‐in/out and show the dynamics in the experience of a device that changes from the ‘extraordinary’ to the ‘ordinary’ over time. We also provide a vocabulary that describes this relationship as stages resembling the one between a couple, which evolves from an early love affair, to being married and to growing old together. By repurposing the time‐in/out distinction from its origin in media studies, this paper marks a move that allows the distinction to be applied to understanding the use and dynamic becoming of computing devices over time.

Developing ecological sustainability: a green IS response model

Growing private and public concern with the environment is pushing businesses to increase their awareness and action. Using the Nordic bank Nordea as a case study and a Green information systems (IS) organizational response model developed on the basis of extant literature, we investigate how Green IS initiatives become part of a firms overall strategy and part of the organizational sustainability process. We find that Green IS initiatives are initiated through a bottom‐up process where environmentally concerned individuals identify issues and become Green IS champions. They use their authority and edification skills to promote Green IS to the organizational agenda. If the issue is aligned with the organizational agenda, it receives managements endorsement. The empirical case also shows two types of systemic feedback that can fuel a self‐reinforcing sustainability process. The first type of feedback increases the champions ability to promote Green IS in the future through authority and edification. The second type leads to the transformation of organizational value through reinforcement and extension. Finally, we identify interrelationships between organizational response processes, where higher‐order response processes, e.g. change of corporate values, function as gatekeepers or pre‐conditions for when and which issues are promoted to the organizational agenda.

An analysis of business models in Public Service Platforms

Abstract Public Service Platforms (PSPs) are a new type of technology platform. They are based in the philosophy of New Public Management (NPM) and support public services for citizens in quasi-markets. This article increases our understanding of the business models behind these PSPs in terms of their Value Propositions, structures, networks, and financing. We interviewed representatives from 14 PSP providers in four public sectors in Sweden: education, healthcare, elder care, and public pensions. We identified a “Traditional view” with its focus on public agencies and neutral information and an “Emerging view” that includes dialogues, user evaluations, long-term perspectives on choice, promotion of the ideal of choice, and self-promotion by public agencies. The article contributes to research with its empirical example of the digitalization of NPM and the underlying business logic of PSPs.

Industry-Wide Supply Chain Information Integration: The Lack of Management and Disjoint Economic Responsibility

Experiences from enterprise-wide integration initiatives during more than four decades indicate that industry-wide information integration could render substantial benefits. Two ways in which industry-wide integration differs from enterprise-wide integration are that there is no common management level and the economic units in the integration are the constituent units, not the industry. Management involvement has been emphasized as perhaps the most critical success factor for enterprise-wide information integration. The common economic unit enables increased costs in one part of the organization to lower the total cost in the company as a whole. In this article the authors address which consequence these two differences have for the development of information integration in four industry-wide supply chains. The authors find the existing methods for enterprise-wide information integration, such as BPR, virtually impossible to apply on industrywide information integration and that the disjoint economic responsibility is a hampering aspect in reaching potential benefits of industry-wide information integration.

Smart Phones and Their Substitutes: Task-Medium Fit and Business Models

Drawing on data from a longitudinal field study, this paper investigates the influence of existing, better and stand-alone technology substitutes on the use of smart phones. By applying prospect theory, media richness theory, and business model literature, the purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of the role of substitutes, device content fit issues, and implications for business models by asking the question: What is an effective business model to address the relationship between user preference and the fit of the smart phone and everyday task? The field study data suggest the need for business models to recognize that adoption decisions are reference dependent and strongly influenced by the fit between task and smart phone.

Do consumers pay more using debit cards than cash

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted We study if the payment method affects willingness-to-pay.Debit cards lead to higher average bids than cash.Our results are robust to cash-on-hand constraints, price familiarity, consumption habits and spending type.The representation of money seems to matter for consumer valuations. We conduct an incentivized experiment to study the effect of the payment method on spending. We find that the willingness to pay is higher when subjects pay with debit cards compared to cash. The result is robust to controlling for cash-on-hand constraints, spending type, price familiarity and consumption habits of the products. The evidence thus suggests that different representations of money matters for consumer behavior. Such results further tease out the underlying mechanism of how payment methods influence spending behavior, which poses important implications for both consumers and merchants, as well as designing of digitalized payment in the future.