Business Model in the IS Discipline: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature

Although the Business Model (BM) concept provides a convenient unit of analysis in the business practices, BM research in the Information Systems (IS) field emphasizes blurriness and divergences in its structure. With this paper we provide a clarification of the BM concept and update Al-debei and Avison [1] analysis on the BM literature. Using a structured methodology, we review the titles and the abstracts of 108 articles from IS literature and examine a significant subset of 49 articles. Our work contributes first, to formalize the concept of BM as instanced in IS domain and organizes BM studies around two different frameworks. Second, it highlights the BM research streams and their current states of the art. Last, it discusses the current limitations of the BM studies and offers the basis for future research.