Mobile Services in the Smart City: Framing the Potential Roles of City Governments

This paper presents a theoretical framework for the analysis of business models that involve public actors, and city governments in particular, in the value network. It starts from an established business model framework and expands it to include an additional set of parameters required to successfully perform a qualitative analysis of the business models of new (digital) services offered by cities. It then applies this framework to four divergent cases from the mobile services sector in which city governments are involved as part of their efforts in becoming “smarter cities”.