Tina Saebi

Fifteen Years of Research on Business Model Innovation How Far Have We Come, and Where Should We Go?

Over the last 15 years, business model innovation (BMI) has gained an increasing amount of attention in management research and among practitioners. The emerging BMI literature addresses an important phenomenon but lacks theoretical underpinning, and empirical inquiry is not cumulative. Thus, a concerted research effort seems warranted. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature on BMI. We identify and analyze 150 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on BMI published between 2000 and 2015. We provide the first comprehensive systematic review of the BMI literature, include a critical assessment of these research efforts, and offer suggestions for future research. We argue that the literature faces problems with respect to construct clarity and has gaps with respect to the identification of antecedent conditions, contingencies, and outcomes. We identify important avenues for future research and show how the complexity theory, innovation, and other streams of literature can help overcome many of the gaps in the BMI literature.

Social Entrepreneurship Research: Past Achievements and Future Promises:

The past decade has witnessed a surge of research interest in social entrepreneurship (SE). This has resulted in important insights concerning the role of SE in fostering inclusive growth and institutional change. However, the rapid growth of SE research, the emerging nature of the literature, and the fact that SE builds on different disciplines and fields (e.g., entrepreneurship, sociology, economics, ethics) have led to a rather fragmented literature without dominant frameworks. This situation risks leading to a duplication of efforts and hampers cumulative knowledge growth. Drawing on 395 peer-reviewed articles on SE, we (1) identify gaps in SE research on three levels of analysis (i.e., individual, organizational, institutional), (2) proffer an integrative multistage, multilevel framework, and (3) discuss promising avenues for further research on SE.

Taking Part in the Circular Economy: Four Ways to Designing Circular Business Models

The traditional “take-make-dispose” consumption model cannot sustain in the long run and companies need to adapt their business models to find more sustainable ways to create, deliver and capture value. Business models that decouple economic growth from raw material input, using a circular approach, will become essential in the near future. This idea has come to be known as the circular economy. In the circular economy, resources are kept in use for as long as possible, by for example reusing or repairing products that would have been thrown away in a linear economy. To illustrate how companies can implement circular business models in practice, we provide examples from the do-it-yourself-construction retail industry in Norway - a traditional industry known for its wasteful “take-make-dispose” approach. We propose four business model designs that offer different ways for companies to become more circular rooted in the ideas of product life extension, resource recovery and product-as-service logic. As we will discuss, while some of these practices can be added to the retailers existing business model, others require a more radical change in the traditional business model. By means of our findings, we intend to encourage retailers to change their business models towards greater sustainability and eventually steer their suppliers and customers towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns.

Collaborative consumption : live fashion, don’t own it : developing new business models for the fashion industry

The rise of collaborative consumption or the sharing economy has brought forward new business models in many industries, such as in hotels (e.g. Airbnb), transportation (e.g. Uber), and more recently, in the fashion retail industry (e.g. Rent the Runway). While the exchange of fashion items commonly used to take place between private individuals, an increasing number of retailers have innovated their business models to provide a platform that facilitates renting or sharing of clothing items between consumers and/or the retailer. Little academic research exists however on how retailers can design their business models to create, deliver and capture value from this new form of collaborative consumption. Based on a sample of twenty-six fashion retailers (Europe, US) that engage in fashion-sharing, this paper analyses their different underlying business models and identifies three sharing business model archetypes (Fashion Rental Model, Swapping Model, and Second-hand Retailing Model). Interviews with CEOs of these companies provide further insight into the main motivations and challenges in adopting sharing-business model. In so doing, we offer retailing managers a practical framework to guide business model innovation for collaborative consumption, as well as advance academic research by bridging the literatures on business model innovation and collaborative consumption.