Designing your future business model: An activity system perspective

Building on the received literature, we conceptualize a firm's business model as a system of interdependent activities that transcends the focal firm and spans its boundaries. The activity system enables the firm to create value in concert with its partners but also to appropriate a share of the value created. Anchored on theoretical and empirical research, we suggest two sets of parameters that activity systems designers need to consider: design elements - content, structure and governance - that describe the architecture of an activity system; and design themes - novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency - that describe the sources of the activity system's value creation.Business model; activity system; design;

Business model innovation: Creating value in times of change

We highlight business model innovation as a way for general managers and entrepreneurs to create and appropriate value, especially in times of economic change. Business model innovation, which involves designing a modified or new activity system, relies on recombining the existing resources of a firm and its partners, and it does not require significant investments in R&D. We offer managers and researchers a conceptual primer on business model innovation emphasizing the importance of system-level thinking.Business model; innovation; activity system; design; value creation;

Emotional assuring, trust Building, and resource mobilization in start-up organizations

Based on a five-year field study of six new ventures, we investigate whether and how organization foun-ders use affective influence, a form of emotion management, with diverse stakeholders, namely investors, board members, customers, and employees. We found wide differences in founders' propensity to use affective influence actions and that not all affective influence actions were effective in mobilizing re-sources for the new firm. We identified a particular form of beneficial affective influence we call "emo-tional assuring," which refers to affective influence actions that seek to build three different dimensions of trust in regard to the new firm: (1) the firm's integrity, (2) the founder's competence as an entrepreneur, and (3) the founder's benevolent character. Although firms that practiced little emotional assuring could mobilize adequate resources as well as firms that did it in munificent environments, the latter gained an upper hand and were more resilient under tough economic conditions. We also identified the moderating conditions and limitations of emotional assuring.Affective influence; emotional assuring; emotion; entrepreneurship; organization creation; resource mobilization; trust;

The affective roots of resource heterogeneity: How founders' emotion regulation helps create social resources in startups

Where do firms' heterogeneous resources come from? Our qualitative, inductive study of nascent firms over seven years revealed that founders' differential use of emotion regula-tion behaviors can explain differential creation of social resources at the firm level. We found that founders' emotion regulation behaviors cluster around three themes: (1) the founder's temporal perspective (short-term versus long-term); (2) the nature of founder benefits (economic versus emotional rewards); and (3) the target of founder attention (self versus others). We theorize that founders' emotion regulation behaviors according to these themes influence the incentives of founders and stakeholders and thereby enable the creation of valuable and difficult-to-imitate social resources for their ventures. Social re-sources include discretionary support provided by founders and stakeholders, as well as founder persistence and stakeholder willingness-to-help. Our study contributes to the strategy literature by showing empirically the link between specific emotion regulation behaviors and the emergence of resource heterogeneity at the firm level. It specifically contributes to resource-based theory by separating the theory's main assumptions and outcomes, reducing concerns about potential tautology.Resource heterogeneity; resource-based view; emotion regulation; entrepreneurship;

The business model: Theoretical roots, recent developments, and future research

The paper provides a broad and multifaceted review of the received literature on business models, in which we attempt to explore the origin of the construct and to examine the business model concept through multiple disciplinary and subject-matter lenses. The review reveals that scholars do not agree on what a business model is, and that the literature is developing largely in silos, according to the phenomena of interest to the respective researchers. However, we also found some emerging common ground among students of business models. Specifically, i) the business model is emerging as a new unit of analysis; ii) business models emphasize a system-level, holistic approach towards explaining how firms do business; iii) organizational activities play an important role in the various conceptualizations of business models that have been proposed, and iv) business models seek not only to explain the ways in which value is captured but also how it is created. These emerging themes could serve as important catalysts towards a more unified study of business models.Business model; strategy; technology management; innovation; literature review;

Business Model Innovation: Toward a Process Perspective

Business model innovation matters to managers, entrepreneurs, and academic researchers because it represents an often underutilized source of value and, as such, could translate into sustainable performance advantage. Yet, despite the importance of the topic and the increasing attention it has received from researchers, relatively little is known about the process of business model innovation. To address this gap, this chapter draws on the design literature to derive a generalizable and normative model of the business model innovation process. This contribution links creativity at the individual and firm levels with innovation at the business model level of analysis and thus acknowledges explicitlt the multilevel nature of innovation

Business Model Design and the Performance of Entrepreneurial Firms

We focus on the design of an organization’s set of boundary-spanning transactions—business model design—and ask how business model design affects the performance of entrepreneurial firms. By extending and integrating theoretical perspectives that inform the study of boundary-spanning organization design, we propose hypotheses about the impact of efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model design on the performance of entrepreneurial firms. To test these hypotheses, we developed and analyzed a unique data set of 190 entrepreneurial firms that were publicly listed on U.S. and European stock exchanges. The empirical results show that novelty-centered business model design matters to the performance of entrepreneurial firms. Our analysis also shows that this positive relationship is remarkably stable across time, even under varying environmental regimes. Additionally, we find indications of potential diseconomies of scope in design; that is, entrepreneurs’ attempts to incorporate both efficiency- and novelty-centered design elements into their business models may be counterproductive

Global Equity Capital Markets for Emerging Growth Firms: Patterns, Drivers, and Implications for the Globalizing Entrepreneur

The expansion and development of global financial markets has led to a rapid rise in foreign IPOs and listings. As the opportunities for financing ventures have increased significantly, so has the complexity of decisions facing entrepreneurs and others who need to tap into these markets. When equity can be sourced virtually anywhere in the world, how do managers make decisions about listing a German firm on the Neuer Markt, Nasdaq, or both? The authors draw upon academic literature and their own research on foreign IPOs on US and German exchanges, as well as interviews with senior executives at firms that chose to list on a foreign exchange. This chapter summarizes some of the key benefits that attract companies to list on foreign exchanges, including gaining access to capital, offering liquidity to existing investors, enhancing the company\u27s reputation at home and abroad, providing currency for acquisitions in the foreign country, offering exit opportunities, dispersing ownership geographically, and achieving a higher valuation. Against these benefits, they present a set of costs, including underpricing and dilution, direct costs of the IPO, reporting requirements, and recurring costs. By weighing these costs and benefits entrepreneurs can develop informed strategies for taking advantage of globalizing equity markets

The Business Model: A Theoretically Anchored Robust Construct for Strategic Analysis

Anchored in our research on business models, we delineate in this article a future research agenda. We establish that the theoretical and empirical advancements in business model research provide solid conceptual and empirical foundations on which scholars can build in order to explore a range of important, yet unanswered research questions. We draw inspiration on the direction of the business model research agenda by briefly reviewing several distinct bodies of literature adjacent to the business model literature including new organizational forms, ecosystems, activity systems, and value chain. In doing so, we also distinguish the business model concept from seemingly similar concepts that have been proposed by researchers

Wissenschaftsforschung Jahrbuch 1996/97

Seit längerer Zeit werden Konzepte entworfen, Instrumentarien entwickelt und Maßnahmen ergriffen, deren Ziel es ist, die Strukturen einer Wissenschaftslandschaft zu gestalten, in denen die Gewinnung wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse in universitären und außeruniversitärer Forschungsstätten mit der materiellen Potenz und Tatkraft innovativer Wirtschaft zusammengeführt werden kann. Untersuchungen über diesen grundlegenden Vorgang neuerer Wissenschaftsentwicklung sind ein wichtiges Anliegen von Wissenschaftsforschung. Die Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsforschung hat sich dieser Fragestellungen angenommen und sie im Rahmen ihrer Jahrestagungen 1996 und 1997 unter dem Thema „Wissenschaft – Innovation – Unternehmertum“ analysiert und diskutiert. Dabei ist es gelungen, theoretische überlegungen mit historischen und aktuellen Fakten zu verbinden. Die Ergebnisse werden hiermit – in Fortführung der Publikationsreihe – als Jahrbuch 1996/97 der Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsforschung dem interessierten Leser vorgestellt.Peer Reviewe