Draft:Community Franchise Business Model

  • Comment: You have not established notability outside Dolomiti SuperSki into a general concept. It may be that this draft might be repurposed as an article on that entity.
    It appears to be a 'reverse franchise' where the businesses own the franchisor. Is that the 'Community Franchise Business Model'? Does it extend past DSS?
    Your references are insufficient to prove notability 🇵🇸‍🇺🇦 FiddleTimtrent FaddleTalk to me 🇺🇦‍🇵🇸 11:12, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

A community franchise (CF) is a business model that allows any group with community responsibilities at any level of governance, e.g., community, local, state or federal levels, to identify a societal need, to define and establish the value to the government of having that need met, then to have other enterprises propose solutions to that identified need and for those enterprises to be paid an agreed amount for service provision that achieves those stated aims under the branding of the community organisation.

The business model was investigated in 2016 by researchers at the Institute of Transport and Logistic Studies in the Business School of Sydney University, Australia[1] looking at the unusual way in a business sense that ski lifting is organised in this part of the Italian Dolomites. The business model involves a Franchisor, Dolomiti SuperSki (DSS), (which does not directly undertake any of the transport service roles itself), and multiple Franchisee lift operating entities (which own and operate all the transport/lifting devices on the network). The sale of tickets to the public and the payment to franchisees for service provision is through Dolomiti SuperSki.

The ski fields in which this business model operates, occupy areas close to Ortisei in the Bolzano province of the South Tyrol region of Italy. The community needs a transport system designed for public use as this is essential to the core ski-oriented businesses of the region. Other ski lifting services that operate in the same way, were not identified operating in any other ski field in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Nor was an equivalent publicly owned transport system found to operate anywhere in the world with the operating principles of this business regime. The term Community Franchise was used by Dolomiti SuperSki to describe how their operations differed from those of other ski field transport operations.

DSS is a commercial entity founded in 1974 as a joint association of over 160 local operating companies in 12 adjacent ski areas. It is a private company owned by these local businesses and associations, with its main office in Kastelruth, Italy. The franchisee lift operators are all privately owned operating entities and range from small individual concerns which may own a single ski lift, to large companies that operate multiple lift systems in several areas of operation of the overall ski field.

Prices for tickets are set by DSS, and the expected revenue allows DSS to offer to each of the franchisee lift operators an amount per passenger for transport of that passenger on the line owned by the Franchisee. There is no payment of any sort for providing the service, only a fee for the passengers who uses each Franchisee’s ski lift. Detectors in each loading station of a ski lift allow the numbers of users to each transport route to be counted and such numbers are electronically communicated to DSS, which then allows the agreed payment to the owner of that ski lift to be made, all in real time. Payment is for service provision only: it is directly in proportion to the usage of each transport line, with no payment being made for service provision itself. A line can only survive economically by attracting sufficient passengers to justify the capital expenses and running costs incurred by the franchisor.

DSS attracts franchisee lift operators by offering to pay a specified amount for the delivery of each passenger on a franchisee’s line, taking both distance and elevation into account. Based on this amount per passenger and the number of passengers expected a franchisee operator use their proposed route (one that has not been previously selected or developed by other franchisee operators), and calculates the amount of capital it is willing to invest in the infrastructure to carry skiers up the section of the mountain they have determined best suits their technological solution for the intended ski lift. The Franchisee balances the capital cost and operating expenses of their line with the expected cash flow from the anticipated patronage.

Once their unique route and the credentials of the intending franchisee have been accepted by DSS, the franchisee has conditional title over this defined transport entity. It is a real asset that they can develop in whatever way they determine is best for their circumstances and is recognized as one that can be used as collateral to raise capital from banks and other lenders. It is also an asset that can be developed and sold like any other business, providing that the conditions of the franchise agreement they have with DSS continue to be met.

The business arrangements put the incentive on the franchisee operator to optimize firstly the route chosen, then the capital expenditure and running costs of the infrastructure. Good choices in these two areas of concern will maximize the commercial value of the route and the financial return to the franchisee which will justify capital expenditure and operational arrangements. It also optimizes the travelling experience for the passengers, through the necessary focus on gaining patronage by the franchisee.

There are several economic theories that Community Franchising can be considered against, but that of Complexity Theory, whereby the economy is seen as a complex evolving system, as opposed to the stable, shock absorbing system of traditional economics, can be an explanatory tool that makes clear how the business model operates in real life. This is revealed by examining how a Community Franchise accommodates a high degree of evolution, without top-down intervention. The mechanism of selection works on all participants of the system, but only those transport businesses, i.e., the lines with infrastructure supported by the travelling public, survive, with the successful ideas involved in that application then able to be copied or modified as required for new lines.

The workings of the selection mechanisms accommodate this evolutionary inclined definition of design. A definition of design has been proposed which describes the processes observed in the Dolomites[2]. Design has been defined as a three-stage iterative process for the modification of an existing or imagined artefact, article, process, or other definable entity, being,

1) the introduction of variation of any characteristic,

2) the evaluation of those variations against performance criteria, and

3) the selection between variations, to produce a new example of the artefact, article, process or defined entity.

This definition is consistent with a complexity view of an economy that continuously evolves, responding to the selection pressures of the economic environment. [3] It is also consistent with theories of design being an evolutionary process as presented by Dennet[4] and is the manner in which allows for the transport network to evolve without the guidance of an overall controller.

References

  1. ^ Emerson, David; Mulley, Corinne; Bliemer, Michiel C.J. (November 2016). "A theoretical analysis of business models for urban public transport systems, with comparative reference to a Community Franchise involving Individual Line Ownership". Research in Transportation Economics. 59: 368–378. doi:10.1016/j.retrec.2016.05.007. ISSN 0739-8859.
  2. ^ Emerson, David (2020). "An Augmented Definition of the Design Process". Community Franchising. Sydney: Sydney University. p. 72.
  3. ^ Beinhocker, Eric (2007). The Origin of Wealth. Random House Business Books. pp. 187–239. ISBN 9780712676618.
  4. ^ Dennet, Daneil (2017). The Evolution of Minds. New York: Notron and Company.

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