قراردادهای مبتنی بر دستاورد به عنوان مدل کسب و کار جدید : نقش مشارکت و دارایی های رابطه ای ارزش محور

This paper investigates the new business model of outcome-based contracts where the firm is tasked to achieve outcomes of equipment as a service contract instead of the traditional maintenance, repair and overhaul activities (e.g., power-by-the-hour® engine service contract). Through a qualitative study of two outcome-based contracts between BAE Systems, MBDA and the UK Ministry of Defence, we derive three value drivers of information, material and people transformation. Mapping it with transaction cost literature we propose five relational assets based on the value drivers; three value-driven alignments and two partnership inputs. We then study the relationships between the relational assets and contract performance through a quantitative survey by applying the partial least square (PLS) method. Our study shows that behavioral and information alignments are important to achieve outcomes. However, material and equipment alignment (i.e., joint supply chain) does not have a significant effect on contract performance. In addition, perceived control and empowerment mediated the relationship between partnership inputs and value-driven alignments. Our study provides a more integrated view of how various theoretical management domains overlap in the understanding of business models, and contribute to the understanding of value drivers and partnership factors in achieving performance in outcome-based contracts.

The concept of business models has been increasingly discussed in academic literature since the advent of the internet and the proliferation of e-businesses in the 1990s (Morris, Schindehutte, & Allen, 2005). To attract funding, the early “dot.com” companies used the idea of business models to pitch the attractiveness of their proposed business ventures (Shafer, Smith, & Linder, 2005). The literature encompasses several themes contributing to key concepts of a business model. First, value drivers are important elements for businesses and new business models are often a consequence of changes in these value drivers. These are defined as value-creating activities or transformations that generate revenue for the firm (Chesbrough, 2007). Second, the performance of a company, through the change in such value drivers, is an essential element in a business model. Literature has described the performance of business models as that which requires a joined-up, systems-focused and holistic understanding across the firm's existing resources and capabilities, to retain or achieve a competitive advantage in the industry it sits within as environmental conditions change (Wirtz, Schilke, & Ullrich, 2010). Third, the formation of successful partnerships is a feature of new business models. This is echoed in strategy literature where the ability to establish strong partnerships as capabilities is recognized as core-competencies (Johnson, Christensen, & Kagermann, 2008). According to Demil and Lecocq (2010), the firm's “value chain of activities” should include the fostering of partnerships as part of the building blocks of a business model. Clearly, business models exhibit a need to be value-driven, partnership-focused, and with the unit of analysis centered on the value-creating system that transcend traditional boundaries (Zott & Amit, 2010). There is also the need to understand the inter- or intra-organizational activities that contribute to that system, of which revenues are derived from its performance. Despite the proliferation of the term, we argue that there are three major gaps in business model literature. First, new business models emerge across different industries in different ways and there may be greater heterogeneity in both their theoretical conceptualization and their empirical and practice characterization. This is evidenced by the number and the inconsistency of “key concepts” that seem to emerge from the literature, as well as by the different definitions of a business model ranging from “an underlying core logic” (Shafer et al., 2005) to “system manifested in the components” (Tikkanen, Lamberg, Parvinen, & Kallunki, 2005). Second, it is also important not only to understand the key concepts, but also to appreciate how these concepts – such as value drivers, partnerships, customer-centricity – relate to one another both theoretically and empirically, and how they manifest themselves in practice for different types of business models. Finally, since business model investigations require a holistic approach, there should be a concerted attempt to bring together extant approaches of the various disciplines of marketing, strategy, operations and OBHRM in a trans-disciplinary manner and into an empirical context, to understand the characterization of new business models so as to both critique and draw insights into intra-disciplinary assumptions. Only when the new knowledge is reconciled with the existing, can we build on its scholarship and transfer the knowledge of business models across other new contexts. Our study examines a particular new business model of outcome-based contracts (OBC) in equipment service, and empirically investigates the firm's capability to achieve the expected performance. Equipment-based services have traditionally been contracted on the basis of revenue-generating activities, materials and time required to maintain, repair or overhaul equipment such as engines and elevators. This often results in provider opportunism since the very activities that disrupt the customer's use of the equipment are those that generate revenue for the firm, and the firm has less incentive to ensure the long-term care of the customer's equipment. Recently, OBC for equipment-based service have come into prominence in marketing practice and theory (Ng et al., 2009 and Ng and Nudurupati, 2010). With outcome-based contracts such as Rolls-Royce's “Power-by-the-hour®”, the firm is paid not according to its service activities such as material and repairs, but based on the outcome of such activities in continual use situations i.e., the number of hours of engine in the air. This is analogous to the well-known story in marketing of being paid for holes-in-walls, rather than for the maintenance, repair and upkeep of the drill (Levitt, 1960). This new business model is challenging for marketing theory because continual use of equipment sits within the customer's space and requires the customer's resources to achieve their own goals. From the delivery standpoint, OBC is unlike traditional service contracts where there is a sequential process (call comes in, processes triggered, equipment repaired, activities invoiced). In OBC, there is usually no sequential ‘value chain’ to speak of; effective equipment use is a consequence of collaborative processes and practices with the customer in a value-creating system to achieve positive outcomes. Achieving the performance of an ‘outcome’ is therefore dependent on the nexus of logistics, relationships, operations and management within the system and how they come together effectively so that engines continue to generate power and planes continue to fly. Such a system requires a complete rethink of the firm's business model and its capability, in particular its capability to cooperate reciprocally with the customer. We argue that such a business model capability would require all stakeholders to invest in relational assets that are both value-driven and partnership-focused. Our investigation begins with a qualitative study within which we found three value drivers that are part of the value-creating transformations of the system. These are material transformation, information transformation and behavioral transformation. Based on a comprehensive review of a diverse set of theoretical literature in operations, OBHRM, strategy and marketing, we integrate the literature with our qualitative findings and propose five value-driven and partnership constructs we consider to be relational specific assets (cf. Madhok & Tallman, 1998) for OBC. We hypothesize the relationships between the constructs and contract performance, with two intervening variables from OBHRM literature. We subsequently operationalize the variables and quantitatively investigate their interactions and impact on contract performance through a survey. We then analyze the resultant two partnership input constructs, three value-driven alignments, and the intervening variables with partial least square (PLS) analysis. Our analysis reveals that, counter-intuitively, OBC performance is dependent on the relational assets of behavioral and information alignments rather than on material/equipment process alignment (i.e., the joint supply chain). This suggests that the new business model of OBC has to completely re-think how the supply chain towards equipment performance should be designed and configured for consistent use outcomes, since the system of material and equipment use interacts with other value drivers and is no longer linear. Our results also show that all three alignments are driven by partnership inputs of complementary competencies and congruence of expectations, and the relationships are further mediated by HR constructs of perceived control and empowerment of individuals. This means that the complex value-creating system in OBC includes multiple management interactions to achieve contract performance and it is a challenge to understand where management begins and operations end. These cross-function interactions suggest that more research is needed on how firms could be better organized to achieve outcomes with their customers in this new business model, but also to consider how disciplinary knowledge can stay relevant when boundaries between them collapse. This paper is organized as follows. We first review relevant literature to set the foundation for this study. We then introduce the research context and the qualitative study. Based on the findings from the qualitative study, we further propose several hypotheses to be tested in a quantitative study. The result of the quantitative study is then reported, followed by discussion and conclusion.

The study of new business models is often complex and constitutes a ‘messy’ problem, with several interacting components across disciplines and functions. Our study illustrates a systematic view of how various theoretical streams in marketing, OBHRM, operations and strategy connect and overlap in complex practice and proposes that future research in new business models could apply a similar approach. Through such integration, we also provide a systematic understanding of the OBC delivery, contributing to continuing scholarly work on managing and delivering OBC, and the challenge in acquiring such a capability. Finally, our study is important for both researchers and practitioners to understand the role of OBC in adopting a sustainability agenda. The capability to manage the new business model of continuous equipment use through a different sort of collaboration could lead to OBC being an enduring and viable alternative for equipment manufacturers and customers in achieving long-term use of equipment rather than continuing on the path of producing, consuming and discarding equipment.