Shaping the consumption of mobility. A netnographic study of shared mobility business models' circular value propositions.

Abstract: This thesis follows the short path drawn by scholars in the empirical study of CE value propositions, aiming to provide answers to how firms attempt to shape urban mobility consumption in practice. For doing so, this paper takes over the empirical study of the value propositions of ten innovative shared mobility business models which constitute on its own some practical examples of circular business models from a theoretical perspective. The research focuses on studying the embedded value qualities of these shared mobility service firms’ value propositions within a built CE business model theoretical framework, which is supported by the Value Proposition Canvas (Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda, Smith, & Papadakos, 2015) as a theoretical tool that enables detailed identification of the qualitative constituents of the value proposition. By employing a netnographic qualitative research method for the gathering of the circular studied value propositions, this study aims to understand how service firms manage and qualify their value propositions in order to shape the consumption of urban mobility through their delivered shared mobility services.