Business models and business model innovation: Between wicked and paradigmatic problems

Abstract While research on business models and business model innovation continue to exhibit growth, the field is still, even after more than two decades of research, characterized by a striking lack of cumulative theorizing and an opportunistic borrowing of more or less related ideas from neighbouring fields in the place of cumulative theory. We argue that the lack of cumulativeness stems from lack of construct clarity (i.e., BM and BMI are seldom defined with much precision) and lack of agreement on definitions, which in turn imply that the core constructs are not dimensionalized in a way that eases theory-building and empirical testing. Lack of progress on these matters partly reflect that the BM and BMI constructs are used in multiple explanatory contexts, so that it is not entirely clear what are the problems that BM and BMI research seek to solve. We argue, with Teece (2010), that the BM and BMI constructs are fundamentally about the architecture of the firm's value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms; theoretically the key aspect of BMs is complementarity between activities underlying these mechanisms; BMI means novel changes of such complementary relations; and this understanding not only unifies diverse contributions to the literature but is also productive of new insight.