A conceptual framework for evaluating City Logistics business models

Several City Logistics initiatives so far have proved to be successful in achieving the objectives of all stakeholders involved, and emerged as a response to the negative impacts generated by freight transportation demand within cities, such as pollution and congestion. Analysing the business models of CL initiatives, both best practices and non-successful projects, can increase our understanding of recurring factors and common patterns that make CL initiatives not only successful from an operational point of view, but also profitable for private entrepreneurs and stakeholders. To this day, only few recent academic papers have investigated CL initiatives and innovations taking into account their business models, tackling this issue by exploring several initiatives. Therefore, the present work aims at contributing to bridge this research gap by means of a conceptual framework that takes into account the main business-related aspects of a CL project. The framework is developed following a deductive-inductive approach, integrating the dimensions that compose a business model, such as value proposition, strategic assets and customer segments, with the operational dimensions of a CL scheme, retrieved from pertinent literature and best practices. The framework is applied to 14 projects, and two kind of preliminary results are proposed. First, a brief description of business models is presented, mainly taking into account some aspects such as mission, value proposition, governance and management and core competencies. Most of the projects focus on optimizing and improving existing infrastructure, associating to this mission a value proposition of increased transport efficiency for carriers. Then, some implications for the success of the projects are drawn from cross-checking elements from the business models. A clearly stated mission that focus on a clear value proposition to achieve the objectives of private stakeholders (e.g. transport efficiency) has shown to be a potential success factor.