Developing Mobile Services: Balancing Customer and Network Value

Designing mobile services and the business models behind them is a complex undertaking. A business model can be seen as a blueprint of four interrelated components: service offering, technical architecture, and organizational and financial arrangements. How these different components are related to one another, is hardly been object of research. In this paper the connections between these components are explored by analyzing the critical design issues, e.g. targeting, branding and customer retention in the service domain, security, quality of service and system integration in the technology domain, network governance in the organization domain, and revenue sharing in the finance domain. These critical design issues are linked to each other and to expected customer value and expected network value in a conceptual model.