Sustainable Business Models Report

When anonymised and analysed, mobile ‘big data’ can provide valuable and actionable insights, and add value when addressing environment, social and governance (ESG) challenges.

Long term sustainable solutions are being pursued and actively monitored, which require sustainable investment and funding, ie sustainable business models, to underpin them. To date, pilots and case studies have played an important role in proving the technical feasibility and potential social impact of mobile big data. The data has been applied to a wide variety of social good use cases. However, the maximum ‘social benefit’ is delivered when the data is used at scale and over a long period of time. The lack of sustainable business models has proved a barrier to moving from promising one-off initiatives to large-scale, long-term deployments of mobile big data.

This report explores the types of business model that are most relevant to mobile big data applications, and concludes that to realise the potential of mobile big data, all stakeholders in the ecosystem need to apply the form of sustainable business model that best supports their objectives. This ensures long-term growth and enables the mobile big data solution to scale, thereby delivering maximum social impact for the beneficiaries.