Barriers to business model innovation in the Swedish urban freight transport sector

Abstract

Business model innovation (BMI) is an important but challenging process that is potentially hampered by obstruction and confusion. Despite its significance, BMI is an underexplored topic in research on urban freight transport. By studying two examples of technological innovations, namely electrified freight vehicles and digitalisation, this paper reviews the existing literature and reinterprets five cases of attempted BMI in the Swedish urban freight transport sector. Three key issues are suggested to impede innovation. First, BMI and technological development are two closely related processes that influence each other. Thus, they are part of a complex context that is difficult for project participants to assess. Second, decision makers confront difficulties in deciding the specific stakeholders to prioritise and may thus unintentionally exclude important groups. Third, as BMI is a novel approach to business development, it presents participants with considerable uncertainty about the responsibilities that they and other actors have toward each other. These issues indicate that in the urban freight transport sector, the theoretical dichotomy of barriers emanating from either obstruction or confusion must be expanded to include a third barrier, strategic misalignment, which arises due to diverging interests and organisational incentives.