Business model tools at the boundary: exploring communities of practice and knowledge boundaries in business model innov
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RESEARCH PAPER
Business model tools at the boundary: exploring communities of practice and knowledge boundaries in business model innovation Johannes S. Schwarz 1
&
Christine Legner 1
Received: 11 December 2018 / Accepted: 5 October 2019 # Institute of Applied Informatics at University of Leipzig 2020
Abstract As companies engage in business model (BM) innovation, they increasingly turn to BM tools, such as the Business Model Canvas, the STOF framework, or e3-value ontology. The main advantages associated with these tools are that they establish a standard lexicon, or common language, within an organization. Despite the increasing scholarly interest in BM tools, we still lack theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for understanding their roles and uses in BM innovation. In this article, we argue for conceptualizing BM tools (i.e. models, methods, and IT support), as boundary objects that must have the capacities to overcome the knowledge boundaries between different communities of practice. Based on empirical insights from six case studies and an in-depth field study, we make three contributions: First, we identify five typical communities of practice involved in BM innovation in large organizations. Second, we analyze the knowledge boundaries between them. Third, we discuss implications for BM tool design as boundary objects with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic capacities. Keywords Business model innovation . business model tools . Boundary objects . Community of practice . Case study
Introduction Competitive pressures and technological advances have pushed business model (BM) innovation to the top of management and academic agendas (Chesbrough, 2010; Foss & Saebi, 2017, 2018). As practitioners and scholars seize the BM topic, the academic understanding of the BM concept is maturing (DaSilva & Trkman, 2014; Foss & Saebi, 2018; Massa, Tucci, & Afuah, 2017). The discussion is therefore increasingly moving from BM conceptualization towards applying the concept for BM innovation (Clauss, 2017;
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Business model innovation: Tools and Innovation patterns. * Johannes S. Schwarz [email protected] Christine Legner [email protected] 1
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne, Internef Office 127.3, Quartier de Chamberonne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Cortimiglia, Ghezzi, & Frank, 2016; Foss & Saebi, 2017; Wirtz & Daiser, 2018). In this context, Bouwman et al. (2012) observe a rising research interest in tools for designing, communicating and implementing BMs, such as the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010), the STOF model (Bouwman, Faber, Haaker, Kijl, & De Reuver, 2008), the e3-value ontology (Akkermans & Gordijn, 2003), or BM roadmapping (De Reuver, Bouwman, & Haaker, 2013). The existing literature uses the term BM tool ambiguously to denote models and methods, possibly IT-enabled, that support different tasks during BM innovation. While BM tools come in a variety of forms, prior research has emphasize
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