Electronic Markets on business model development
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EDITORIAL
Electronic Markets on business model development Rainer Alt 1 Published online: 11 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Dear readers, This issue of Electronic Markets features a special theme on business model tooling and addresses several design issues in the area of multi-sided platforms as well as privacy, which in turn are relevant for developing business models. Over the years, the topic of business models has had a long tradition in the journal Electronic Markets. As mentioned in an editorial six years ago, the business model definition coined by Paul Timmers in 1998 is the highest cited article in the 30 years history of Electronic Markets and still referenced today (Alt and Zimmermann 2014). In fact, over the past six years the number of citations has almost doubled compared to the sixteen years before: the 2′200 citations in October 2014 rose to some 4′300 in August 2020 following a Harzing search at Google Scholar. This steep increase illustrates the role of this article in the growing attention of business model research. It has attracted the attention of many researchers in the areas of strategic and innovation management as well as information systems, who have advanced the understanding regarding the structure, the design and the success factors of business models.
Specifics of business model development In the information systems field there are two main streams: one the one hand, information systems are enablers for (digital) business models and on the other, they are helpful in developing business models. The enabling role dates back to the notion of strategic information systems, which recognized information technology (IT) as a “competitive weapon” (Ives and Learmonth 1984; Wiseman 1985). In addition to streamlining financial and administrative processes, this perspective regarded IT as an enabler for improving the position in the
marketplace. It took more than one decade until this thinking spurred the first influential publications on business models (see Magretta 2002; Nielsen and Lund 2014) and may be seen as the most profound form of digital transformation. This follows the early argumentation of Venkatraman (1994), who saw business scope redefinition as the ultimate step in his transformational trajectory, which combines high degrees of business transformation and potential benefits. From the conceptual side, business models have become known as intermediate designs between an organization’s overall business strategy and the more specific operational designs of structures, processes and systems (e.g. Veit et al. 2014). With the attention of information systems only shifting over time from administrativesupportive to strategic-enabling, methodological support for developing business models is the youngest in the information systems discipline. Another recent editorial described that at least three periods may be distinguished in the evolution of methods and techniques for digital transformation (Alt 2019, p. 307f), i.e. software (e.g. entity relationship modeling), process (e.g. b
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