Paths of Business Model Evolution - Findings from Business Model Patents

All firms have business models (BMs) and they continuously modify their BMs to adjust to dynamic environment. The objective of this paper is to find paths of technology based BM evolution by investigating BM patents which are representative data source of technical BMs. The paper begins by reviewing the BM and BM patents, and provides a description and justification of the proposed evolutionary paths of BM ‒ major (origination, transplant, mutation) and minor (variation, alternation, addition or subtraction) evolutionary stream. The paper concludes by highlighting the key findings and drawing limitation and