۱- Introduction

۲- Business models: a multi-purpose tool

۳- Data and methods

۴- Results and discussion

۵- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Climate services support mitigation and adaptation to climate change and encourage a science-based and climate-informed policy development. A performing market is vital for supporting uptake of climate services. The diffusion of innovations depends on how business models – meant as firms’ strategic choices to create, capture and share value within a value network – are employed. Innovation in business model, rather than product innovation only, has been proved useful for overcoming bottlenecks associated with development and diffusion of technologies. But only few studies have analysed how business models are used within the context of climate services. We fill this gap by using a sample of 32 climate services provisions at different stage of development. We use an original and revised version the Business Model Canvas as a framework to facilitate the data collection and analysis processes. A quali-quantitative approach is employed to tackle the content of the administered semi-structured interviews and to map them into a connected set of nodes representing concepts as provided by the selected informants. By combining Content and Network Analysis we present how business model aspects interact both within and across components. We find that the Value Network in which climate services operate is crucial for success, while a subscription, online-based infrastructure is a widespread tool in reaching the target users. The creation of partnerships and consortia of organisations allows mutual learning opportunities to happen and boosts the innovation behind these products. We focus on the graph giant component to highlight the role of co-creation approach in generating direct and indirect incremental innovations while delivering seasonal forecasts and tailor-made services. Finally, we call for tighter link between business and climate-related aspects to enhance the importance of financial considerations around climate services provision.

Introduction

Substantial efforts have been made in recent years to develop and foster use of climate-services for climate adaptation policy and decision making. Defined as “timely production, translation and delivery of useful climate data, information and knowledge” (Barron, 2001), climate services and products embrace climate records, catalogues of extreme events, reanalyses, forecasts, projections and indices used in vulnerability and risk assessments. Given the growing interests and application in many sectors (Vaughan and Hewitt, 2018; Bruno Soares et al., 2017; Bruno Soares and Dessai, 2016), development of climate services has progressively shifted away from top-down, supply-driven (pushed) towards user-centric and -tailored (pulled) innovation processes. This has helped climate services’ projects to overcome the “valley of death” (Brasseur and Gallardo, 2016), a critical stage between prototype and operational phase in which resources are often lacking to launch a product or make it fully operational (Barr et al., 2009). Climate services require novel approaches to reach those who need it most (Buontempo et al., 2018; Soares et al., 2018). Inadequate engagement of users stood as a barrier preventing greater adoption for individual and collective decision making (Brasseur and Gallardo, 2016). Research has identified business models as tools to close this gap: they enhance innovation (e.g. (Boons and Lüdeke-Freund, 2013); (Chesbrough, 2010), support sustainability (Hansen et al., 2009) and overcome barriers in the product development stage (Chesbrough, 2010). They link production and consumption sides (Boons and LüdekeFreund, 2013; Long et al., 2017) and function as market devices (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault, 2009). In this paper we explore critical factors behind business models using a sample of 32 climate services. The set comprises ongoing and completed collaborative innovation projects, but also in-house innovations of single businesses. We conducted semi-structured interviews with senior-level managers, using the business model canvas (BMC) as a framework. BMC makes it possible to identify nine components that are constantly interacting and evolving throughout the life span of a service. We revised the standard BMC and added two crosscase building blocks that are important for an embryonal market. We employed content analysis and assigned codes to various token of the transcribed interviews. By using graph theory and network analysis, we assessed the relationship between key topics, representing them in a directed graph where nodes are codes and links are weighted on the proximity between words in each token of text.