Convenor
Convenor's affiliation
Patrick Spieth
University of Kassel
Co-convenors
Dirk Schneckenberg, Kristel Miller, Joan Enric Ricart
Abstract
The business model topic attracts continued interest in business research and practice, spanning the fields of strategy (Leppänen et al., 2023; Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart, 2010), innovation (Spieth et al., 2023; Foss & Saebi, 2017) and entrepreneurship (Snihur and Zott, 2020). While business models are conceptualized as boundary-spanning activity systems encompassing value creation, value capture, and value delivery activities (Teece 2018; Snihur and Zott 2020), business model innovation describes “designed, novel, nontrivial changes to the key elements of a firm’s business model and/or the architecture linking these elements” (Foss and Saebi 2017). Despite the conceptualization of business models and business model innovation and its constituting elements (Schneckenberg et al., 2022), researchers engaged in identifying the antecedents and consequences of business model configurations (Leppänen et al., 2023) and business model innovation (Spieth et al., 2023), covering multiple theoretical perspectives and research phenomena like sustainability (Klein et al., 2021) and digital transformation (Bohnsack et al., 2021).
Description
Recent developments (e.g., review articles) in the research field of business models helped to consolidate the literature about constituting elements and business model conceptualizations (Spieth et al., 2023; Snihur and Markman, 2023; Foss and Saebi, 2017), while empirical work increased the understandings of the complex link between business model configurations and firm performance (Leppänen et al., 2023). However, scholars still face persistent questions about business model configurations, antecedents, and outcomes (Spieth et al., 2023). Different conceptual perspectives emerged to explain the development of business models and business model innovation. Business model (innovation) research spans various research phenomena like digital platforms, competition, and sustainability (Snihur and Markman, 2023). The research fields need further understanding of how business models evolve in certain competitive settings to outperform other business models, but also how to design a business that allows for superior value creation and capture beyond purely economic values. Recent phenomena like circularity, digitalization, and artificial intelligence, among others, jointly allow for a wide range of avenues for further investigations.
Questions/topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
• Unveiling the complex relationship between various antecedents of business model innovation
• How can theoretical insights from other research domains explain business models and business model innovation (e.g., from social sciences)?
• How do various actors’ cognitive processes influence value creation and capture in business model design?
• Managing the complexity of business models and business model portfolios
• Understanding the role of interdependencies between business model activities, strategies, and the competitive environment
• Understanding the linkages between BMs and digital ecosystems
• Understanding of designing effective value propositions in new ecosystems (e.g., biodiversity)
• Unfolding business model innovation in the context of digital transformation and artificial intelligence
• Competitive implications of business model configurations in (digital platform) ecosystems
• Design of innovative business models for novel economic approaches (e.g., system-level transformation)
• Specifying the role of business models in bringing about system-level change in ecosystems (e.g., biodiversity)
• How can stakeholders successfully be integrated to develop novel business models?