Customer-Centric Business Modeling: Setting a Research Agenda

Enterprises based on a traditional, internally oriented business model consider their available resources as a starting point for determining their service offerings. However, in a world of changing customer behavior, emerging online service providers and ongoing technological advances an internal focus is no longer sufficient. The idea that customer needs should be the starting-point for designing business models becomes increaseingly accepted. This paradigm shift towards a customer-centric perspective opens up a highly relevant field of research. In this paper we present a research agenda which contributes to the development of approaches for the identification of customer needs and for the setup of customer-centric business models. The agenda is structured along three major research questions in this field. For each of these we develop first directions of multi-disciplinary research.