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1. Introduction
Business model innovation has been seen as an important means for firms to obtain and sustain competitive advantages (Guo et al., 2016; Adner and Kapoor, 2010; Amit and Zott, 2012). Firms can achieve fast development and outperform the competition with effective business model innovation (Mitchell and Coles, 2003). Along with the advancement of digital and internet technologies as well as the increasingly opening market environment, firms’ boundary has become more and more vague, and seeking multiple cooperation and creating value together have become new trend and increasingly important contexts for business model innovation (Teea and Jaana, 2013). Many previous studies have found that open search for external knowledge is vital for firms’ innovation success (Phene et al., 2006; Chesbrough, 2003; Cillo, et al., 2019; Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001; Papa et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2020). In spite of a cumulative body of knowledge is developing to understand the influence of search scope on innovation outcomes, many extant studies have mainly focused on sources of knowledge for technology innovation (Laursen and Salter, 2006; Leiponen and Helfat, 2010; Del Giudice, et al., 2017), and few studies has investigated the influence organizational search on business model innovation.
Scholars have identified two main organizational search activities: local search and boundary-spanning search (Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001). The fundamental dichotomy of the business model innovation construct lies in the distinction between efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model innovation (Zott and Amit, 2008). The limited existing research on antecedents of business model innovation from organizational search perspective mainly focus on examining the impact of search on general business model innovation (Yuliya and Jonas, 2019), little research has directly investigated the impacts of both local and boundary-spanning search on the dichotomy of business model innovation (efficiency-centered versus novelty-centered). The knowledge-based theory of innovation suggests that different innovation types require different source of knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Trantopoulos et al., 2017). Some emerging literatures begun to explore the association between specific search and specific innovation types (Yuliya and Jonas, 2019). However, the extant literature fails to articulate a clear, logic path from different organizational search to different business model innovation. This lacuna is surprising because local search and boundary-spanning search represent two dimensions of...