Empirical classification of resources in a business model concept

Abstract

The concept of the business model has been designed for aiding exploitation of the business potential of an innovation. This exploitation inevitably involves new activities in the organisational context and generates a need to select and arrange the resources of the firm in these new activities. A business model encompasses those resources that a firm has access to and aids in a firm’s effort to create a superior ‘innovation capability’. Selecting and arranging resources to utilise innovations requires resource allocation decisions on multiple fronts as well as poses significant challenges for management of innovations. Although current business model conceptualisations elucidate resources, explicit considerations for the composition and the structures of the resource compositions have remained ambiguous. As a result, current business model conceptualisations fail in their core purpose in assisting the decision-making that must consider the resource allocation in exploiting business opportunities. This paper contributes to the existing discussion regarding the representation of resources as components in the business model concept. The categorized list of resources in business models is validated empirically, using two samples of managers in different positions in several industries. The results indicate that most of the theoretically derived resource items have their equivalents in the business language and concepts used by managers. Thus, the categorisation of the resource components enables further development of the business model concept as well as improves daily communication between managers and their subordinates. Future research could be targeted on linking these components of a business model with each other in order to gain a model to assess the performance of different business model configurations. Furthermore, different applications for the developed resource configuration may be envisioned.