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Introduction
The concept of business model innovation (BMI hereafter) has attracted increasing attention from practitioners and scholars in micromanagement research (Foss and Saebi, 2017; Spieth et al., 2014: Zott et al., 2011). Top-ranking journals in the fields of management and strategy (e.g. Long Range Planning in 2010; Harvard Business Review in 2011; International Journal of Innovation Management 2013; Strategic Organization in 2013; research and development (R&D) Management in 2014; and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in 2015 have dedicated special issues to the theme of BMI. Additionally, prestigious conferences such as the Academy of Management (AoM) and the Strategic Management Society (SMS) conference have seen a rise in the number of sessions devoted to BMI. Given this interest of the academics and the practitioners, deeper scrutiny and criticism of the issues related to BMI has followed. According to Zott et al. (2011, p. 1020) business models (BM Hereafter) “have yet to develop a common and widely accepted language that would allow researchers who examine the business model construct through different lenses to draw effectively on the work of others.” This can be attributed to a wide variety of definitions and classifications of BMI available in the extant literature, with no consensus across studies (Bashir and Verma, 2019).
There are several systematic reviews of the BMI literature (Bashir and Verma, 2019; Foss and Saebi, 2017; Wirtz et al., 2016; Lambert and Davidson, 2013; George and Bock, 2011; Zott et al., 2011 see Table 1). These reviews have analyzed extant BMI literature from multiple lenses. First, these reviews have pointed out the differences among researchers based on the definition of BM and its components. However, there is a widespread acknowledgment of the usefulness of the construct in research on strategy, e-commerce and technology management (Zott et al., 2011). Second, the existing reviews have highlighted the use of BM for enterprise classification whereby BM is used to understand value drivers for e-business (Amit and Zott, 2001; Margetta, 2002). Third, some reviews consider BM as an antecedent of firm performance (Bashir and Verma, 2019; Zott and Amit, 2010; Weill et al., 2005). Fourth, researchers have also seen BM as a potential unit of innovation (Foss and Saebi, 2017; Zott et al., 2011).
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