Business Model Dynamics — Towards a Dynamic Framework of Business Model Components

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, in the course of the rising commercial use of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the transformation of traditional to digital business, the business model concept has prevailed as a promising unit of analysis. To describe business models, they are typically broken down into single business model components. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the dynamics between them, i.e. which dependencies and interdependencies exist between business model components. Hence, a successful transformation and innovation of business models still remain a heavy task without having such knowledge on the internal behavior. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of business model literature aiming to discover structural relations between business model components. This was achieved by analyzing numerous individual literature sources. In pursuing this explorative approach, a large number of dependencies and interdependencies could be discovered and mapped onto the unifying Business Model Component Framework, which was developed prior to this study. (This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled “Interdependencies between Business Model Components— A Literature Analysis,” [65] presented at the 19th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2013), Chicago, Illinois, August 15–17, 2013, AIS Electronic Library (AISeL), pp. 1–9.)