Developing a Business Model for Cross-Border E-Services: the LD-CAST project
Alessio Maria Braccini, Paolo Spagnoletti · LUISSThesis - Open Archive · 2008
The term “Business Model” started to gain momentum in the early rise of new economy and is today used both in business practice and in scientific research. Under a general point of view BMs are considered as a contact point among technology, organization and strategy in order to describe how an organization get value from a technology and use it as a source of enduring competitive advantage. Anyhow, notwithstanding the amount of research available, this area is still fragmented. Trying to overcome problems linked to different perceptions of the concept in this area of interest, some contributions summarize existing literature defining frameworks, classifications, typologies and taxonomies of BMs. A methodology adopted in recent works uses ontologies to define a shareable conceptualization of BM. Ontologies adoption is common when semantic problems affect requirements definition or participatory design processes. The use of an ontology as a mean to share and represent knowledge on a specific topic could be also worthwhile in innovative and collaborative environment where different partners meet each other to achieve a common goal or need to define shared business tasks involving information and communication technologies. The aim of this study is to investigate the possibility to use an ontology based approach as a conceptual tool to define the business model in a context characterized by the deployment of e-services in a cross border environment. Our assumption is that this approach can provide useful insights when new IT based services are deployed among subjects who need to cooperate among each other on the base of their different needs, legal constraints and cultural background. The 1 CeRSI LUISS Guido Carli University, Roma, Italy, [email protected] 2 CeRSI LUISS Guido Carli University, Roma, Italy, [email protected] empirical part of this study, which is out of the scope of this paper, is based on a participative action research project carried out from January 2006 in the context of an EU project (LD-CAST) aiming at enabling the cooperation among Chambers of Commerce from different countries to provide traditional and new services, based on semantic technologies and service oriented architectures. Through an extensive literature review on BMs we motivate the selection of the conceptual tool used in the LD-CAST project for the definition of a common exploitation plan and for the design of a new BM.