Business model formulation – The value proposition Mel Collier, Leuven University, Business Planning Group

Value proposition – the heart of the Business Plan A business model is understood to be ‘the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value’ (Osterwalder, Pigneur 2009 via Harry Verwayen, Europeana Business Development Manager).

The model Value proposition: an organization seeks to solve customer problems and satisfy customer needs with value propositions. Channels: value propositions are delivered to customers through communication, distribution and sales channels. Customer relationships: each value proposition offered to a client group establishes a relationship. Key activities: the activities that are required to offer and deliver the value proposition. Key resources: the resources that the organization needs to perform the said activities. Key partnerships: the partnership network the organization needs to establish to perform certain activities that it cannot efficiently perform by itself.

Key activities – Value to whom? 1. Providing access to own repository The research library? The end user? The aggegrator? RSS - possibility to get informed about new items on the field you are interested in If it does link into premium context there needs to be a way to go through the authentication system of the researcher's home institution to allow access (if available) don't restrict the research portal to a search index for content; create a community where researchers come for content, expertise, news on specific subjects (such as a calender of congresses (per discipline), developments, latest publications per discipline, high rates articles etc)

Key activities – Value to whom? 2. Enabling searching of bibliographic records of texts in hard-copy and metadata for related digitised texts at the same time 3. Offering OCR services for providers’ digital content to support full text searching in the portal (universities more ‘neutral’ and national libraries more ‘vital) 4. Pushing the data out to other academic / research services e.g. Primo Central / Summon

Key activities – Value to whom? 5. Enriching metadata (e.g. using the opportunities offered by Linked Data) and returning it to contributing libraries 6. e-prints on demand 7. Providing access to sub-sets of material within the overall collection – e.g. early printed materials; medical books

Key activities- Value to whom? 8. Preparing and processing libraries’ metadata on request for delivery to other organisations, e.g. publishers or thematic aggregation services 9. Providing tools and space for researchers to curate virtual exhibitions (university libraries more ‘important’ and national libraries more ‘neutral)

Contact for further information Martin Moyle (UCL, London, and WP2 leader) Mel Collier (KU Leuven, and Chair Business Models Group) Marian Lefferts (CERL and WP2) Europeana Libraries website: