Designing service-dominant business models

The emergence of service-dominant logic has influenced business in many domains. It emphasizes the interaction of the producer, consumer, and other value-network partners as they co-create value through collaborative processes. These processes can be seen as service-for-service exchanges of these actors, which contrasts with the output orientation of the goods-dominant-logic that emphasizes how actors exchange output units. This paradigm transition has significant implications on doing business: the business requirements to services will change faster, and the complexity of value-networks required to meet these requirements will increase further. This requires new approaches to business engineering that are grounded in the premises of service-dominant logic. This paper introduces the service-dominant business model radar (SDBM/R) as an integral component of the business engineering framework that we have developed for engineering network-based, service-dominant business. Existing approaches to business model design follow an organization-centric view rooted in goods-dominant-logic, which does not allow adequately modeling the character of service-dominant business. The SDBM/R was developed with close collaboration with industry experts and empirically validated through a series of hands-on workshops with industry professionals from several domains. Thereby, this paper contributes a novel business design approach that has proper academic background and relevant practical embedding.