Emerging business models in innovation ecosystems: the case of indoor location based services

In this paper we analyze the hurdles paving the road to a wealthy indoor location service market. Indoor is a natural extension to outdoor LBS services and it is expected to be highly appreciated by the end users and the venue owners that are expected to play a key role here. Some commercial propositions are already on the market both from the mobile ecosystems incumbents like Google and Apple as well as other companies that engage mainly in social networks like Shopkick and Foursquare. None of them can be considered the ultimate solution and additional market propositions are expected to take into account the maturing approach to the market of different and additional players. We start from the assumption that there will be two main solutions to the market. There will be an aggregate solution, where an aggregator provides solutions that span different venues and will provide a single user experience. This will mainly adhere to the consumerization model that is prevailing in mobile and the venue owners will have a limited possibility to manage the interaction with the visitors. The other possibility is to adhere to a B2B model where the venue owners will have the incentive and the power to engage into a personalized interaction with the visitor. With these models in mind, the technologies and how they can aggregate into systems and ultimately into business relations and business models is a clear case in which a coordination among a large number of business players has to be achieved that will span all the way up from the technological solutions to the systems to the flow of money. Our argument centers on how and why joining an open alliance is the right move to increase coordination and shorten the time necessary to consolidate an offer backed by a strong and open eco-system.