Business Model Dynamics from Interaction with Open Innovation

Abstract

In today’s competitive environment, firms face strong challenges. We live in a volatile,uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment where open innovation is a strategicchoice and, on top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized most of these disrupting forces.Incumbent companies must act strategically by adapting their business model to minimize the riskand to capture the new value that emerges. This article intends to contribute to the development ofthe nascent stream of research that seeks to understand the evolution of Business Models throughtime—known asBusiness Model Dynamics (BMD)—and explores how to better align this evolutionto the implementation settings of strategy. This exploratory study is built upon a meta-synthesisapproach to identify, analyze, and clarify how academics have dealt with the three terms used in theBusiness Model Dynamics research strand: Business Model Innovation, Business Model Adaptation,and Business Model Evolution. The results of the meta-synthesis show that a disambiguation ofconcepts is necessary as, from an organizational learning point of view, it is required to provide abetter connection between strategic value appropriation and changes on Business Models. This articlecontributes to the researcher and practitioner ’s literature on Business Model Dynamics offering a clearand rigorous definition of each term from a strategic point of view, thus preventing the conceptualincoherence and their reiterated wrong use as synonyms