Stakeholder engagement and business model innovation value

ABSTRACT

Despite important strides made in the business model literature, substantially less is known regarding its constituent sub-concept of business model innovation (BMI). In particular, the role and dynamics of different stakeholders’ BMI-related engagement remain nebulous, as therefore explored in this paper. Moreover, though business models are recognized to house firm-based value propositions, the nature and extent of stakeholders’ actual perceived BMI-related value (BMIV) remains tenuous, exposing a second research gap. Addressing these issues, we first develop the BMIV concept, defined as a stakeholder’s perceived value created through some nontrivial new aspect in a firm’s value creation, – communication, -delivery, and -capture mechanisms and activities. Using interdependence theory’s outcome transformation, we then develop a conceptual model that recognizes the role of different BMI stakeholders’ interdependent engagement in creating BMIV. Specifically, BMI stakeholders are predicted to consider the goals/interests of focal others, alongside their own, in their BMI-related engagement, in turn affecting all these stakeholders’ BMIV. We predict BMIV-based stakeholder engagement to differ based on whether stakeholders’ goals/interests converge or diverge: While converging stakeholder goals tend to yield cooperative/equality-based SE, diverging goals trigger altruistic/aggressive SE, as formalized in a set of propositions. We conclude by deriving important implications from our analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Business model innovation
• value
• stakeholder engagement
• interdependence theory
• outcome transformation

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Jan Hendrik Schumann and Associate Professor Tina Saebi for a discussion and/or exchange of ideas, and Brodie et al. (2016) for a discussion on Engagement and related issues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Conflicts of interest

None.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank The Icelandic Centre for Research (RANNIS) for partially funding this study (grant number 218235-051).