Ontological Foundations for Strategic Business Modeling: The Case of Value, Risk and Competition

To cope with increasingly dynamic and competitive markets, enterprises need carefully formulated strategies in order to improve their processes, develop sustainable business models and offer more attractive products and services to their customers. To help them make sense of this complex environment, enterprises resort to an array of strategic business analysis tools and techniques, such as SWOT and the Business Model Canvas. Most of the tools, however, are derived from informally defined social and economic concepts, which hinders their reuse by practitioners. In this thesis, we address this limitation by means of in-depth ontological analyses conducted under the principles of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). In particular, we focus on the notions of value, risk and competition, as these are recurrently employed by many techniques and yet, still suffer conceptual and definitional shortcomings. One main contribution of this thesis is the Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER), a reference conceptual model that disentangle and clarifies several perspectives on value and risk, while demonstrating that they are ultimately two ends of the same spectrum. We demonstrate the usability and relevance of COVER by means of two applications in ArchiMate, an international standard for enterprise architecture representation. A second contribution is the Ontology of Competition, which formally characterizes competitive relationships and defines the nature of several competitive relationships arising in business markets.