ELECTRONIC BUSINESS MODELS: FIVE CASES FROM FIVE
INDUSTRIES
Horsti, Aleksi, Helsinki School of Economics, P.O.Box 1210, 00101 Helsinki, Finland,
aleksi.horsti@jippii.com
Tolonen, Jyrki, Åbo Akademi University, Henriksgatan 7, 20500 Åbo, Finland,
jyrki.tolonen@digiscope.fi
Brännback, Malin, Åbo Akademi University, Henriksgatan 7, 20500 Åbo, Finland,
malin.brannback@abo.fi
Abstract
The term business model has been used loosely several times for describing a company’s strategies,
revenue model, processes and overall business logic both by researchers and practitioners. Several
authors have defined a business model concept and described the constructs of a business model. Still,
only a few studies, if any, concentrate on the evaluation of business models. Hence, this paper
attempts to shed more light on this issue by evaluating five electronic business models from five
different industries including travelling, media, logistics, telecommunication, and manufacturing.
Within electronic business model evaluation, we have emphasised the evolution and maturity of
success in terms of critical success factors (CSF) and customer need factors (CNF). Results deriving
from the five case studies indicate that traditional business fundamentals, such as running business at
profit, abilities of personnel and long customer relationships, are essential in order to gain success in
electronic business models. Furthermore, we noticed that success factors, CSFs and CNFs, are
different depending of the maturity phase of an electronic business model. Finally, we argue that B2B
and B2C businesses have, in fact, very similar kind of features in e-business.
Keywords: Business model, Life cycle model, E-business, Success, Critical success factor, Customer
need.
1
INTRODUCTION
During the last few years, the electronic business has become one of the main phenomena and topics
discussed among the researchers and business practitioners. This discussion does not only apply in the
case of the Internet hype, but also in ter