Tourism consumption in Sweden 2015 was SEK 263 billion, an increase by 7% from 2014 and 46,7% from 2005 (Tillväxtverket, 2016, p. 16). For Stockholm Archipelago, no statistics are available, but guest nights in the guest harbours can be a proxy for tourism development. In 2015 there were 172,531 overnight guests in private yachts, a decrease by 31% from 2014 and 29% from 2005. During the same period, the other types of commercial lodging in the country as a whole has had a monotonous increase in over night guests totalling 40,7% in the past decade. According to Löfmarck & Wolgast (2010) more than 50% of employees worked for businesses with 6 employees or less, while 10 companies supplied about a quarter of the jobs in the tourism sector and the seven largest companies constituted the top quartile in terms of revenue; there were few rather large companies and many small businesses. The archipelago is considered a good tourist amenity, but obviously there is dire need for rethinking how things are done in the region in, order to catch up, and one reasonable point of departure is assessing the business models in use. For this reason an EU-Interreg financed project was launched on October 1st, 2016. A first issue to settle is updating the situation on businesses active in the archipelago, where after comes the assessment of their business models, in which businesses are to be linked to students, where the former get access to up to date tools for business model assessment in collaboration between Drivhuset, a foundation coaching incubator activities at many Nordic universities, Södertörn university in Sweden, and Åbo Akademi University and Novia university of applied sciences in the Finnish archipelagos of Turku and Nyland. Student participation is planned in two ways: In course work students in work groups assess the situation each participant enterprise is in, analyse their business models and suggest alterations. Also, students will do thesis work on bachelor’s and master’s levels. The course work will be assessed on academic as well as practical utility merits, while the theses are assessed on academic merits only. Researchers will follow the development of participant enterprises as well as the project’s impact on quality of education. The project is based on Osterwalder’s business model canvas approach to innovation utilising hypothesis driven design methods, where academic staff guides the process. Going through the literature on business models, it seems that on the one hand, little consensus is about when it comes to the exact definition of the term, while a rather broad one is about, when it comes to that somehow involves value creation – and often value capture, and what the necessary means of doing so are (e.g. Osterwalder, 2004; Teece, 2010; Zott et al. 2011), i.e. it is on how businesses are blue printed in order to sustain themselves, In that sense, it is related to business strategy. (c.f. Teece, 2010). Often there is a presumption on entrepreneurial activity, especially when it comes to business model innovation. In the entrepreneurship literature, there is a distinction between entrepreneur by nature and entrepreneur by necessity. Many of the inhabitants of the Stockholm archipelago are lifestyle entrepreneurs, and hence maximum profit is not self-evident as objective, even though better earnings are welcome; there is not really an option of taking place out of the configuration the business model is based in. The lifestyle entrepreneur is characterised by being able to lead the life at hand as motivation for activities, while the ‘normal’ corporation are taking on economic activity in order to maximise value added, often implying the building of shareholder wealth. The difference implies that the corporation is expected to pursue all businesses that are above the internal rate of interest on investments, while the lifestyle entrepreneur shuns any option that is not relevant to her/his lifestyle. Commonly this means enduring low profitability requirements. These rather atypical businesses open the possibility of widening the scope of the literature to alternatives to entrepreneurial orientation towards strategy, other forms of packaging, and through that, further exploration of the relation between networks and alliances and business models.

References:

Löfmarck A & Wolgast H. (2010). Studie av turismrelaterad näring i åtta skärgårdskommuner, Unpublished report to Stockholm County.Osterwalder, A. (2004). The Business Model Ontology – A Proposition in a Design Science Approach, Doctoral Thesis, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de l’Université de Lausanne, Lausanne. Teece, D.J. (2010). Business Models, Business Strategy and Innovation, Long Range Planning, 43(2-3), 172-194. Tillväxtverket (2016) Fakta om Svensk Turism 2015, Stockholm: Tillväxtverket. Zott, C., Amit, R. & Massa, L. (2011). The Business Model: Recent Developments and Future Research, Journal of Management, 37(4), 1019-1042.