Business model innovation: a temporal perspective

Abstract

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of academic and practitioner-oriented publications on business models and business model innovation. Indeed, companies that traditionally focused on product and service innovation, are turning toward business model innovation as an alternative or complement to product or process innovation. Nevertheless, companies struggle to innovate the business models through which commercialisable new ideas and technologies will pass. At the same time, the literature remains skewed toward product and process innovation rather than business model innovation. This paper highlights the need for a temporal view of the business model innovation process and proposes a conceptual model of the business model innovation process to enable organisations to identify, model and prioritise potential business models. It also develops a prioritisation framework to be used for ranking alternative business models and to form part of an IT-based business model decision support system.