Corporate Mobility as a Valuable Service? : An Exploratory Study from a Business Model Perspective

Sammanfattning: In light of globalisation and sustainability challenges, the potential of shared mobility, or Mobility as a Service (MaaS), has been acknowledged as a way to improve mobility and transport both for the individual user and society at large. A specific type of mobility is that of corporate mobility, or how companies enable their employees to transport themselves during the workday as well as to and from work. This is a an area where MaaS has previously not been applied, thus potentially creating an unexplored business opportunity for someone to offer shared mobility as a service towards companies in need of efficient corporate mobility. To investigate the new solution of corporate Mobility as a Service (cMaaS) and the potential to transform it into a service offered to external customers, this study has been carried out as a single case study applying a business model perspective to the pilot project Sustainable Mobility Services Södertälje, where MaaS is applied to an existing corporate mobility solution. Inquiries have revolved around what constitutes a cMaaS service and what value is created from it, as well as what value a potential customer and their potential users envision. Lastly, we investigate practical challenges associated with our specific case, as well as strategic challenges regarding the business model design for cMaaS. Our findings help to describe the novel concept of cMaaS and propose a definition of it, based on previous definitions of corporate mobility and MaaS. Furthermore, the study concludes that value from cMaaS is multi-dimensional and hard to account for in a single value proposition, both due to the interrelationship between customer and users, and the sustainability value created from it. This is especially critical since cMaaS is a user-centric service. Lastly, the study concludes that the development of a business model for cMaaS is subject to a number of challenges, however this is not a sign that cMaaS is not a promising business opportunity, but rather that it is in an early stage. An experimental approach to it is beneficial, however it is crucial to continue development in an informed way, building on acquired knowledge to improve the experiment and to ultimately decide if cMaaS is an attractive business opportunity and if so, what the most suitable business model is.