Mobile business models: organizational and financial design issues that matter

Designing viable mobile services and business models that capture value for all the organizations involved is a challenge. There are many design issues that can be taken into account, and it is often unclear what their ultimate effect is on the performance of a business model. This paper offers a framework for relating critical design issues to success factors and tests the causal relationship between these core concepts in the organizational and financial domain of mobile business models, based on an international survey among 120 practitioners and experts in the mobile Internet services domain, most of them from EU countries. According to our findings, addressing organizational design issues (i.e. partner selection, governance and relation management) leads to an acceptable division of roles among actors, while addressing financial design issues (i.e., pricing, division of investments and costs among partners) results in risk levels that are perceived to be acceptable. The level of profitability that is perceived to be acceptable is influenced indirectly by these design issues, because the relationships are mediated through the risk level that the actors involved perceive to be acceptable and through the way the roles are divided among the actors.