Business Model Innovation and Firm Performance: A Performance Feedback Perspective

Abstract

[eng] This dissertation is presented as a collection of papers. Therefore, chapters 2 to 5 are written in the format of four stand-alone articles. Each chapter is intending to meet the specific objectives described in the first introductory chapter of the dissertation and with the end goal of contributing to both the Business Model Innovation (BMI) and Performance Feedback Theory (PFT) literature. As one of the conceptual foundations of this dissertation, the second chapter provides a systematic literature review of research on BMI and firm performance. It follows the idea of capturing the conceptual essence largely published in the leading strategic management outlets these past 32 years. Based on a systematic literature review methodology (Tranfield et al., 2003), it has a clear focus on academic peer-reviewed studies rather than practitioner-oriented research. Hence, this chapter aims at determining and understand the nature of the relationship between BMI and FP by looking at the literature in the field. This chapter further arrives at a unifying understanding of the BMI and FP relationship as well as providing a research agenda for future research. The third chapter is a conceptual development paper on how performance can feedback to BMI. The ambition of this chapter is to examine the role played by performance feedback in enhancing BMI. In addition of the BMI literature demonstrating the importance of BMI for firm performance in research conducted in Chapter 2, this chapter reviews the PFT literature to provide insights on the effect of firm performance on BMI. Based on this review, several propositions are emerging, providing a research framework and suggesting the need for a new theoretical approach that could broaden both BMI and PF literature perspectives. Based on the PFT literature reviewed in Chapter 3, the fourth chapter is an essay suggesting the use of qualitative methods in the PFT and its contributions to enlarge the theoretical perspective in the field. Qualitative research represents a useful mean to gain insights about phenomena and mechanisms within the organization and to improve our understanding of interaction and processes present in the Performance Feedback field. Hence, this chapter aims at proposing a new methodological approach to PFT to further help expand the study of the BMI-FP relationship. The fifth chapter of the dissertation is an empirical piece aiming at analyzing the way in which established companies innovate or change their BM based on their performance. Taking a PFT perspective, this chapter studies the relationship between performance relative to organizational aspirations and BMI, looking at the way companies change or innovate their business models based on their past and current competitive performance. The application of PFT leads to four propositions that are discussed by means of five case studies conducted in various industrial sectors. By leveraging the PFT as a theoretical lens, this research establishes an empirical relationship between Performance Feedback and BMI and contributes to better understand the role of firm performance in influencing BMI, constituting a basis for future research. Finally, the sixth chapter concludes the dissertation with reflections on the overarching objective, the theoretical and managerial contributions as well as an outlook on future research development.