Business Model Blueprints for Urban Mobility Services: A Catalogue for Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS)

Effective and efficient mobility of people and freight is a major topic of attention in modern society around the globe, especially in urban environments. To operate a transportation system under increasing complex conditions, a proper synchronization of all involved parties is of utmost importance. These parties include governmental institutions, non-commercial and commercial transport operators, infrastructure managing organizations, added-value service providers, and last but not least the travelers and shippers themselves. To synchronize the parties, they need to exchange data using digital mobility platforms, thereby forming cooperative, intelligent transportation systems, or C-ITS in short.

Consequently, C-ITS form the digital backbone for many integrated mobility solutions. The development of C-ITS is, however, typically seen as a major technological endeavor, in which a spectrum of low-level technological solutions has to be integrated to into a complex, interoperable system that facilitates the data exchange and processing enabling optimal transport. In other words, the emphasis in such development is usually on the technical how of system development. After the development of C-ITS solutions, it often becomes clear that there was little attention for the reasons why the various stakeholders would participate in the collaborative use of the solution. Put shortly: often, there is no business case for a developed solution. Consequently, solutions are not or poorly used in practice.

In this book, we address exactly this issue: we put the emphasis on the development of these business cases that are the starting point for the development of collaborative mobility solutions. We do this in the form of collaborative business models that take into account the main characteristics of all stakeholders involved and that enable a structured analysis of values, activities, costs and benefits of these stakeholders to arrive at a balanced and viable interplay. The approach we have used is based on the service-dominant business model design method, which takes a collaborative ecosystem as a starting point. We present a catalog of business models blueprints that are based on research and innovation work across Europe in the past five years.