مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد سرمایه گذاری های دیجیتال و غیر دیجیتال – الزویر 2019

The business model canvas (BMC) and the lean start-up manifesto (LSM) have been changing both the entrepreneurial education and, on the practical side, the mindset in setting up innovative ventures since the burst of the dot-com bubble. However, few empirical insights on the business model implementation patterns that distinguish between digital and non-digital innovative ventures exist. Connecting practical management tools to network theory as well as to the theory of organizational learning, this paper investigates evolution patterns of digital and non-digital business models out of the deal flow of an innovation intermediary. For this purpose, a multi-dimensional quantitative content analysis research design is applied to 242 ventures’ business plans. The measured strength of transaction relations to customers, suppliers, people, and financiers has been combined with performance indicators of the sampled ventures. The results indicate that in order to succeed, digital ventures iterate their business on the market early and search for investment afterwards. Contrariwise, nondigital ventures already need financial investments in the early stages to set up a product ready to be tested on the market. In both groups we found strong evidence that specific evolutionary patterns relate to higher rates of success.

Introduction

Digitalization has been the driver of economic change, with ups and downs in all industries, since the end of the last century. The development of new options in information technology allowed newcomers to challenge existing value chains with innovative and often disruptive business models. In the days when the dot-com bubble burst, a serious backlash was directed at the digitalization of the economy, due to misdirected investments into unproven business models (Ayres and Williams, 2004; Drori et al., 2009; Min et al., 2008). As a consequence, it seems that the business model as a management tool suddenly went out of fashion, as judged by the publication statistics of Google Scholar and other, similar research (Al-Debei and Avison, 2010; Magretta, 2002). Initiated once again by the publication of Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas (BMC) and Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Manifesto (LSM) at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a new way of thinking in the field of digital entrepreneurship diffused into practice (Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002; Frederiksen and Brem, 2017; Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2011; Ries, 2011). In the combination of both approaches, Steve Blank recommended that the business model evolves based on assumption testing to become a better mechanism of resource combination. He recommends developing and testing hypotheses behind each building block of the BMC in an iterative process while implementing the business (Blank, 2013; Blank and Dorf, 2012).