Fifteen Years of Research on Business Model Innovation

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, business model innovation (BMI) has gained an increasing amount of attention in management research and among practitioners. The emerging BMI literature addresses an important phenomenon but lacks theoretical underpinning, and empirical inquiry is not cumulative. Thus, a concerted research effort seems warranted. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature on BMI. We identify and analyze 150 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on BMI published between 2000 and 2015. We provide the first comprehensive systematic review of the BMI literature, include a critical assessment of these research efforts, and offer suggestions for future research. We argue that the literature faces problems with respect to construct clarity and has gaps with respect to the identification of antecedent conditions, contingencies, and outcomes. We identify important avenues for future research and show how the complexity theory, innovation, and other streams of literature can help overcome many of the gaps in the BMI literature.

Business Model Innovation

“…Some scholars limit BMI to an isolated change to a specific element of the BM, while others call for changes to the entire BM architecture rather than individual elements (cf. Foss and Saebi, 2017). In the first case, the nature of BMI is characterized as changes made to the "value proposition," the "value chain," the "value network," or the "revenue/cost model" (see, e.g., Giesen, Berman, Bell, and Blitz, 2007;Schneider and Spieth, 2014).…”

“…In other words, emphasis is placed on the underlying mechanisms that link together the set of elementary activities into a coherent BM architecture (cf. Foss and Saebi, 2017;Zott and Amit, 2010). Although these contributions briefly touch on the role of organizational units, they are not particularly forthcoming about how such an architecture is formed.…”

“…Their book contains both theoretical and empirical contributions that specifically "deal with the designable parts of organizations, that is, the boundaries and internal structuring of organizations" (Foss and Saebi, 2015: 8). Nevertheless, in a recent review of the BMI literature, the authors argue that more work is still needed before we can fully understand the organizational design aspects of BMI (Foss and Saebi, 2017).…”

“…and Spieth (2013), and particularly Foss and Saebi (2017), have been made to map the current research landscape and make note of potential research gaps that need to be filled in order to move the field forward. Along similar lines, this review approaches the extant literature with the aim of improving our understanding of BMI, and especially the research question formulated in Chapter 1.…”

“…Some themes have been identified by prior reviews (for a similar application, see Schneider and Spieth, 2013;Foss and Saebi, 2017), while others, such as (2) and (4), have not been covered by prior reviews. With this review, I hope to take a further step in the investigation of BMI, without claiming an exhaustive review of the literature.…”