White Spots in Business and IT: An Explorative Study for E-Mobility Services

E-mobility services are important enablers for the success of electric vehicles. In contrast to conventional mobility, where an ecosystem consisting of the vehicle and complementary services has been built up and has improved over decades, the ecosystem for e-mobility is far less advanced and still in its infancy. In order to get on the sustainable path to success in the steadily growing e-mobility market, innovative ideas are necessary which are not covered by existing service offerings. This paper therefore describes a study that explored opportunities for innovative e-mobility service business models through a systematic analysis. Furthermore, each e-mobility service depends on information technology (IT) support. Therefore, IT standardization is an important issue to consider in order to build up more complex services on top of basic services and further advance the e-mobility ecosystem. Consequently, this paper presents results from a survey conducted with 27 e-mobility experts from Germany to help identify necessary standardization gaps in the context of e-mobility services. The paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by proposing a structured, repeatable method for identifying innovative business models and by offering insights into study results. In addition, gaps in the standardization of IT infrastructure that are important for the provision of existing e-mobility services are illustrated.