مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد پیوندهای ذینفعان، یادگیری سازمانی و نوآوری مدل کسب و کار – الزویر 2022

Abstract

     Business model exists within business ecosystems, and stakeholders can exert a key influence on a firm’s business model innovation. Drawing insights from the business ecosystem perspective and resource-based view, this study examines how ties with stakeholders can affect a focal firm’s business model innovation and how the relationship is contingent upon the firm’s learning types. Analyses of 210 Chinese firms reveal that the relationship between intra-industry stakeholder ties and business model innovation is inverted U-shaped, while extra-industry stakeholder ties have a positive effect on business model innovation. The relationships between both intra-industry and extra-industry stakeholder ties and business model innovation are weakened by exploitative learning but strengthened by exploratory learning. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Introduction

     Business model innovation (BMI), which involves holistic alterations to the structure and architecture of firms’ boundary-spanning activity systems for creating, delivering, and capturing value, has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention due to its ability to increase a firm’s competitive advantages (Bouncken and Fredrich 2016; Foss and Saebi, 2017). Nowadays, the locus of value creation and value capture has shifted to the business ecosystem (Adner and Kapoor, 2010) composed of interdependent stakeholders (e.g., customers, competitors, suppliers, social organizations, and other institutions) and the relationships between all stakeholders (Moore, 1993; Wei et al., 2017). Firms are relying increasingly on stakeholders in the business ecosystem to jointly create and capture value by redesigning their business models (Amit and Zott, 2015).

     An increasing number of scholars have realized that the business model, despite being often studied as a firm-centric concept, is an ecosystem-embedded construct (Amit and Zott, 2015; Frishammar and Parida, 2019). They acknowledge that BMI extends the dyadic relationships involving multiple ecosystem stakeholders (Sjödin et al., 2020). Hence, BMI is not only constrained by firms’ internal factors, but also affected by ecosystem-level factors, particularly stakeholders. Despite this, the literature exploring the antecedents of BMI has been guided mainly by the firm-centric view that focuses on the effects of firms’ internal factors (e.g., McDonald and Eisenhardt, 2020; Wei et al., 2017), leaving the role of stakeholders largely underexplored. However, given business model researchers’ growing interests in the business ecosystem, one intriguing question is what role ecosystem-level factors, particularly stakeholders who constitute the principal subjects of a business ecosystem (Lu et al., 2014), play in driving BMI? Unfortunately, the answer remains unclear.

Analysis and results

Results

     The descriptive statistics and correlation analysis results for all variables, including the mean values, standard deviations, and correlation coefficients, are presented in Table 3. To assess multicollinearity, we calculated the variance inflation factors (VIFs). The maximal VIF value in all of the models was 2.309, below the cutoff of 10. To further minimize multicollinearity, we mean-centered the independent and moderating variables before generating interaction terms (Aiken and West, 1991). We adopted multivariate regression analysis and the moderated method (Baron and Kenny, 1986) to test our hypotheses. The steps performed to test the hypotheses are detailed in Table 4.

     H1 predicted an inverted U-shaped relationship between intraindustry stakeholder ties and BMI. We followed the suggestions of Haans et al. (2016), who pointed out that tests of an inverted U-shaped relationship should meet the following conditions: a) coefficients must be significant and of the expected sign, b) the slope of the curve must be sufficiently steep at both ends of the data range, and c) the turning point of the curve must be located well within the data range. First, Model 3 shows that intra-industry stakeholder ties have a positive and statistically significant effect on BMI (β = 0.105, p < 0.05) and that the squared term of intra-industry stakeholder ties have a statistically significant negative effect on BMI (β = − 0.171, p < 0.01). Second, we split the data in half based on the turning point, computed as 0.307. We ran two multivariate regression analyses on the split data sets. The coefficient estimate of intra-industry stakeholder ties for the values less than or equal to 0.307 was positive (β = 0.149, p < 0.05) and the coefficient estimate for the values greater than 0.307 was negative (β = − 0.238, p < 0.1), indicating that both the positive and negative slopes of the curve were statistically significant (Chuang et al., 2018). Third, we plotted the inverted U-shaped relationship as shown in Fig. 2. The turning point of 0.307 fell well within the data range of the centered intra-industry stakeholder ties (− 1.712 to 1.287). Thus, the conditions were satisfied, supporting H1.