International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

Digital technologies are bringing a wide spectrum of business opportunities as well as significant organizational challenges for incumbent companies operating in traditional industries such as the energy one. The diffusion of new technologies is changing the way energy solutions are consumed and experienced, while consumers increasingly take ownership of their consumption, acting as “prosumers”. In this evolving scenario, incumbents are urged to reshape their business models, explore new opportunities and change their organizational structures accordingly. Still, the required organizational re-design process that enables companies to undergo business model innovation (BMI) while exploiting digital technologies is partially neglected in literature. Hence, this study explores how established companies embrace organizational re-design process to innovate their business model. To this end, we leverage a single case study methodology focused on an incumbent energy company. Our findings show how the establishment of a business unit dedicated to digital technologies exploitation has enabled the company’s BMI. More specifically, we point at the critical role played by the know-how and the industrial capabilities to sustain not only the innovation activities of the new business unit, but also the overall company performance and the shift towards a renewed business model.

Incumbent firms’ competitiveness largely depends on the ability to develop digital innovation as novel combination of digital and physical components. This paper provides a better understanding of value creation through digital innovation, focussing on market offerings from incumbent firms. Based on the insights of an exploratory multiple case study with seven cases from the automotive, machine engineering, and consumer goods industries in Germany, we explain the multi-sided changes required for the development and management of digital innovations. Afterwards, we contribute to the further theorization of digital innovation. According to our empirical findings, we decided to discuss the applicability of the resource-based and competence-based approach.

Increasingly, firms follow the strategy of open business model innovation via the Internet. In this form of digital innovation management, firms make use of Internet platforms that allow them to integrate external customers and other stakeholders for (re-)innovation of their business models. However, the used IT tools on these Internet platforms suffer from not being able to merge the content of multiple users in an adequate way, thus the resulting business models suffer from low degrees of quality. Against this backdrop, in this research, we propose to equip these Internet platforms with a wiki technology. This would allow users to add to each other’s content, to make changes or to correct mistakes. In our action design research (ADR), we could empirically validate that this leads to a higher quality in terms of business models’ degree of elaboration. Since research that focusses on the design of Internet-based open BMI is still neglected, our research contributes to the literature base by being the first that answers ongoing open calls for research on this phenomenon of interest.

Today, data are increasing in importance for firms trying to create and maintain a competitive advantage. As value creation is highly dependent on this key resource, data, the necessity of re-designing firms’ business models arises. By conducting and analyzing 58 in-depth interviews, we contribute a distinct set of barriers to data-driven business model innovation showing how data-related, technology-related, aversions and regulatory hurdles are the most challenging. Based on six focus groups that discussed these findings, participants identified the necessity for a change in companies’ firm-centered perspectives on business. Hence, we propose a model of data-driven business ecosystems that aims to provide guidance for conducting successful business in a data-driven world.