Understanding the influence of digitalization on service firm business model design: a qualitative-empirical analysis

This paper focuses on an analysis of how service firm digitalization is reflected in the business model design. We make use of an eclectic research approach combing insights from digitalization research, service firm research, and business model research. Against the background of nine in-depth case studies including 41 interviews and covering a 3-year-period of time (2014–2017), we identify four digital service firm business model archetypes. Our findings show that implementing digital technologies and digitalizing business activities helps service firms to overcome traditional service-related business constraints. Digital technologies help to speed up service processes and to disentangle the still very often assumed linkage between human activities and services. Our data further reveals that service firms are enabled to enhance service availability and service efficiency in this realm. Interestingly, we observe no effect of ongoing digitalization on the firms’ service-related knowledge base. Changes in the knowledge base only relate to digital knowledge.