Is experience a useful resource for business model innovation?

ABSTRACT

Business model innovation has been proposed as a powerful strategic tool, able to offer competitive advantage, create markets and even reshape industries. Despite these powerful effects, little research has been conducted into studying and improving business model generation methods, and even less study has gone into analysing how to define new business models that can exert a disruptive effect on markets and industries. Our work tries to fill this gap, analysing whether experience encourages or discourages the generation of disruptive business models. An empirical analysis was carried out using an experimental methodology. The results seem to contradict the currently dominant Resource-Based View, but can be explained by the theory on inertia in organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Business model
• innovation strategy
• organisational inertia
• idea assessment

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the journal’s editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr José M. Mateu Ph.D. in Management, Degree in Civil Engineering, Master’s degree on Business Strategy and an Executive Development Programme from the IESE Business School (University of Navarra). He worked for more than 20 years in the private sector, where he held management positions in different sectors, such as aeronautics, telecommunications and consulting. He taught strategy and marketing at several business schools in Spain, and was in charge of a couple of public initiatives aimed to support entrepreneurs. He is Member of advisory boards of some firms in Spain. He wrote six books about entrepreneurs, business creation and marketing, and recently returned as a professor to the Academia, where he teaches Innovation and Air Transport Exploitation, at the two most important universities of Valencia. His Ph.D. Thesis, framed in the field of Business Model Innovation, was recently presented.

Dr Isidre March-Chorda Ph.D. in Economics and full professor in the Department of Business Administration, University of Valencia, M.Sc. in Technology and Innovation Management by SPRU, at Sussex University and he is visiting scholar at UC Berkeley 2014. His research interest areas are in start-ups, entrepreneurship and innovation management. Author of more than 15 international papers indexed in JCR, including Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, Technovation, Journal of Business Research and Management Decision. Director of the Master’s degree in Creation of Innovative firms and head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management line research at the University of Valencia. He is also extensively involved in business practice with regard to entrepreneurship-related topics through research projects, mentorship and training programmes. Member of advisory boards of start-ups firms in Spain.