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1. Introduction
Several studies document that the term business model (BM) has become immensely popular as a field of study since the “dot com era” in the mid 1990s (McGrath, 2010; Zott et al., 2011; Fielt, 2014). In the late 1990s, as business ecosystems evolved due to the pressures of globalization and new communication technologies, many companies started to rethink their BMs and business structures by shifting to an electronic (e-business) format (Moore, 1998; Kinder, 2002). New technologies enabled transactions among companies, and between companies and customers, in novel and less friction-filled ways, thus creating value (Amit and Zott, 2001) through either new streams of value (proposition), revenue, or logistics (Mahadevan, 2000). However, the notion of BM is not entirely new. Back in the 1960s (Jones, 1960; Chandler, 1962), there were a number of discussions concerning the interrelationships among strategy, organizational structure, and technologies from a BM perspective.
According to Gordijn et al. (2005), the evolution of BM research can be categorized into five core phases. In the first phase, a number of authors suggested BM definitions and classifications (Timmers, 1998; Rappa, 2001; Magretta, 2002). In the second phase, contributions were concerned with completing the definitions by proposing what elements or building blocks belong within a BM (Linder and Cantrell, 2000; Petrovic et al., 2001; Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002; Sandberg, 2002). The third phase pursued a detailed description of these components (Hamel, 2000; Weill and Vitale, 2001; Afuah and Tucci, 2003), while in the fourth phase researchers started to model the components, conceptually culminating in BM ontologies, such as the “Business Model Canvas” (Gordijn, 2002; Osterwalder et al., 2005). Finally, in the fifth phase (up to the mid 2000s), these models were applied to management and information system environments.
The last decade has pushed BM research even further by focusing on BM innovation (Chesbrough, 2010; Gambardella and McGahan, 2010; Massa and Tucci, 2014), open BMs (Chesbrough, 2006), network-based BM innovation (Lindgren et al., 2010), BM mapping and performance indicators (Nielsen and Montemari, 2012; Montemari and Nielsen, 2013), component mapping in an integration framework (Wirtz et al., 2016), BM patterns (Johnson, 2010; Gassmann et al., 2014), and BM innovation typologies (Taran et al., 2015).
The growing interest in studying...