A method for qualitative evaluation of service-dominant business models

The widespread deployment of digital technologies has driven many contemporary organisations to adopt a service perspective as a means to extend their business practices or to cater to customer needs. To reduce service complexity, organisations engage in collaborative networks to exchange and integrate resources from many concurrent actors to co-create value. As a consequence, in contrast to firm-centric business models, the resulting service-dominant business model becomes networked in nature, describing the logic of how many concurrent actors co-create value and exchange resources. As business models take a pivotal position with respect to organisational performance and business-IT alignment, this places significant emphasis on the valid design and subsequent evaluation of these models, taking into account these service-dominant characteristics. However, we see that limited work is available to support business model evaluation from a service-dominant perspective, to address these concerns, design decisions and the resulting quality of the model. In response, this paper proposes a method for the qualitative evaluation of service-dominant business models. Following a design science research methodology, we have iteratively designed the method supported by theory on service-dominant logic, business model design and business model evaluation. We illustrate the application of the method by means of a case study.