A Framework for Understanding and Analysing eBusiness Models

As the evolution of e-business technology has passed from the early phase of hype and innovation to the mature phase of adoption and use, the research interest of both the academic and business communities is shifting to investigating opportunities for market exploitation of e-business technologies. As a result, the debates around established ebusiness models, as well as the way to achieve business model innovation, are ever increasing. However, while many researchers and practitioners are contemplating business models, there is a distinct lack of appropriate theoretical tools in the literature to structure and codify the extant knowledge in the area. The existing research contributions are featured by a great degree of diversity, which is due to the existence of Adamantia G. Pateli, George M. Giaglis a variety of reasons and motives for making research on business models. Thus, some researchers try to define business models, others to specify their primary elements, while others have proceeded further to introduce methodologies for developing, changing, or assessing business models. In this paper, we draw on a great number of research contributions in the field of e-business models to propose a framework that further decomposes the research area of Business Models into specific research sub-domains. The proposed framework is then applied to organise and review existing research contributions under each sub-domain.