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Abstract: In the past, companies often maintained a business model (BM) for long periods. Today, this is no longer possible as changes in the business environment such as inter-industry competition, shifting patterns of demand, new products, production or distribution technologies erode the power of established BMs. As a consequence, companies are forced to systematically manage or reinvent their BMs and become able at doing so. Although companies believe that the management and innovation of BMs can significantly contribute to business success they are often not able to realize such transformation due to a lack of required abilities and knowledge as well as suited processes and mechanisms to support them. Against this background, the focus of this contribution is on current approaches and procedures for managing and innovating BMs. Based on a literature review within the BM discipline and further associated disciplines BMI approaches have been identified and are described, analysed and compared regarding a practical application. Thus, giving the reader an overview of current comprehensive approaches and thereby establishing a basis for further research and development is the aim of this paper.
Keywords: business model, business model innovation, literature review
1. Introduction
Many studies concentrate on organisational challenges and list possible resources, capacity limitations and success factors, but do not provide a (generic) process model, which supports BMI in practice.
As the current state of BM research is still in a relatively early stage, Wirtz et al. (2015) carried out a study to determine the need for future research. Through the written survey of experts, who are dealing with BMs in practice or do research in this area, a great need to achieve a standardization of terminology and consolidation of morphology (dimensions and attributes) into a commonly accepted model was determined. Thus, it is difficult to design viable BMs without the consistent application of the BM design elements and it has also been identified that it is imperative to concentrate future research on the procedural view of BMI. To meet this demand the actual study will focus on current procedural approaches for BMI in order to promote progress in the BM research field and meet the needs of application-orientation.
2. Objectives and approach of this paper
The main aim of this contribution is...