A business model (BM) is commonly described as the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.
In the FOBIA project’s quest for increasing competiveness of forestry service enterprises, one of the approaches is to promote the development of innovative BMs. This is important to stimulate entrepreneurship in all participating countries.
For the Swedish case, development of BMs is vital for turning the current situation of the forestry service sector’s unattractiveness combined with a low general level of profitability, which is reflected in low abilities for investments and thus for increased innovation and entrepreneurship.
There are however many examples of successful enterprises, but little knowledge exist in how success is connected to the applied BMs. To map BMs in a comparable way is important to enable analysis and understanding of how different enterprises create value, and to identify potentials for increasing competiveness.
The very first step to achieve this is to characterize the BMs currently being applied, which is a prerequisite before continuing the research on their development potentials. The research within FOBIA so far has been focused on developing a framework for mapping and analyzing the main components of BMs for forestry services, to enable national and transnational comparisons.
Currently, a framework is being tested in the four participating countries. A piloting study of the use of digital applications to support BMs is also ongoing. Meanwhile, contact networks are being built up and the foundations are created for the coming large scale state-of-the-art characterizations of forestry enterprises. Partners can prepare for these surveys next year!
Emanuel Erlandsson, SLU Sweden, leading the work package “Business models”