The development of a portfolio of business models: a longitudinal case study of a building material company

Abstract

Dynamic aspects of intended company change can be related to the development and management of a portfolio of business models with regard to competence deployment and to performance. A portfolio of business models is seen as a reflection of the realized strategy of a company, and the dynamics aspects of company change are connected to internal and external critical strategic incidents. The business model elements considered in this research are market position, offering, and operational platform enabling a differentiation between strategic and operational effectiveness. The evolution of a Swedish supplier of building components and systems during a 15-year period is examined. The process data consists of temporal phases where a shift of phase is defined as a change of a specific portfolio of business models. The concept of a portfolio of business models helped to discover new and conflicting standardized or customized business models that were not always intended by the company. The findings indicate that unawareness of intended actions led to unintended allocation of resources or integration mechanisms that negatively affected company performance. On the other hand gains can be achieved if a strategy is deliberately managed as a portfolio of business models which then also can be a tool for managing change in a company.

Keywords:

• Business model
• management
• multiple business models
• management of change
• portfolio of business models

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by Vinnova (the Swedish innovation agency) through the Lean Wood Engineering programme and the Swedish foundation for strategic research through their programme for research mobility. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and supporting comments. Finally, we would also like to thank all participants from Masonite Beams for making this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.