Christoph Zott

Universidad de Navarra | UNAV · IESE Business School

We explore how CEO sensegiving through framing influences incumbent firm response to business model innovation. Our historical analysis of Borders and Barnes & Noble (B&N) in the U.S. bookselling industry after the entry of Amazon.com reveals that although both CEOs framed Amazon's entry as an opportunity, they did so in strikingly different ways....

In the contemporary business landscape, the imperative for innovative approaches to business model innovation (BMI) is more pronounced than ever, especially given the pressing grand challenges, technological disruptions, digital transformation, and pressing environmental and social concerns of our era. The prevailing discourse in business model and...

Developing business model innovation capability is a game changer which allows companies to stay at the top of their game in a rapidly changing world. To maintain their firm’s competitive edge, managers must continuously evaluate the extent to which there is a fit between their company’s business model, market needs, and the external environment. I...

We explore the intersection between the lean startup methodology and research on business models. We note that both perspectives are anchored on a systematic approach to needs discovery and highlight the importance of value creation (vs. value appropriation). However, while the lean startup is centered on creating value for customers through discov...

This chapter develops the concept of business model innovation (BMI) strategy, which refers to the choices made by entrepreneurial leaders of incumbents and start-ups, in for-profit and not-for-profit or hybrid organizations, with respect to (1) the design of a new system of activities; (2) the processes, including their antecedents, by which the n...

Managers and designers of innovative business models that are enabled by emerging technologies need to build legitimacy with ecosystem participants. Yet increasing legitimacy within the ecosystem raises competitors’ incentives to imitate the business model innovators and thereby adversely affecting the innovators’ ability to appropriate value. We r...

In this research, we ask whether and how founders bring about business model innovation. Grounded in an in-depth longitudinal multiple-case study, our analysis reveals three practices that help explain how founders’ thinking patterns and behaviors shape business model innovation in their ventures: industry-spanning search, complex system thinking s...

Research Summary Our inductive field study identifies specific emotion regulation (ER) actions as affective underpinnings of dynamic managerial capabilities. ER refers to the management and modification of one’s own and other people’s emotions for a specific purpose. Our study shows how differences in managers’ attention to ER influence the extent...

This entry provides an introduction to research on business models. The emerging literature highlights the business model as a new unit and level of analysis for scholars of strategic management. It emphasizes a system-level, holistic approach to explaining how firms ‘do business’, and how value is created, not just how it is captured. Researchers...

Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in interest in entrepreneurship research, practice and policy. Since its founding in 2007, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ) has sought to contribute by publishing high quality papers on a range of themes relating to strategic entrepreneurship, broadly defined.

As the twenty‐first century begins to unfold, e‐commerce, with its dynamic, rapidly growing and highly competitive characteristics, promises new avenues for the creation of wealth. Many established firms are creating new on‐line businesses, while new ventures are exploiting the opportunities the Internet provides. These developments generated more...

It is not only products or services that are becoming obsolete but also organizational processes and systems because they simply no longer create enough value. To seamlessly account for the digitalization of the business and the customer side, new ideas are mandatory, and the whole business model is increasingly becoming the new source of innovatio...

This entry provides an introduction to research on business models. The emerging literature highlights the business model as a new unit and level of analysis for scholars of strategic management. It emphasizes a system-level, holistic approach to explaining how firms ‘do business’, and how value is created, not just how it is captured. Researchers...

In order to make quality strategic decisions, managers need a deep understanding of industry dynamics and enterprise capabilities. In this book, we present a conceptual framework that will help executives lead their organizations in highly competitive global markets. For some, it will change frames of reference and accepted priorities in terms of w...

A firm's business model is a template that depicts the way the firm conducts its business. It describes the system of interdependent activities that are performed by the firm and by its partners and the ways that these activities are linked to each other through transactions in factor and product markets. In this article, we focus on the evolution...

Anchored in the broad design literature, we derive four antecedents of business model design: goals, templates, stakeholder activities, and environmental constraints. These business model design antecedents are illustrated using interview data from nine new ventures in the peer-to-peer lending space. We proceed with the theoretical development to l...

The study of business models involves exploring how firms do business at the system level. It lies at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship research and is, therefore, a topic of interest for scholars of strategic entrepreneurship. The purpose of this special issue is to publish work that develops theory on business models, or empirical...

In this essay, we review scholarly work on business models, and provide clarity about the various ways in which the business model has been conceptualized, specifically with regards to value creation and value capture. The business model concept promises to further our understanding of wealth creation by pointing to the design of the firm's activit...

We study how founders manage emotions while building new organizations, and whether and how this affects organization- building outcomes. Emotion management (EM) is part of a person’s emotional intelligence and refers to the modification of one’s own or other people’s emotions. Through a qualitative study of six early- stage firms we show that foun...

Business model innovation (BMI) requires building legitimacy, but increased legitimacy raises the possibility of imitation by competitors. To analyze this dilemma, we adopt an institutional perspective. We argue that entrepreneurs can strategically design the content, structure, and governance of their new business models to selectively increase le...

Business model innovation matters to managers, entrepreneurs, and academic researchers because it represents an often underutilized source of value and, as such, could translate into sustainable performance advantage. Yet, despite the importance of the topic and the increasing attention it has received from researchers, relatively little is known a...

In this paper we develop theory about what leads to business model innovation (BMI). BMI is an innovation type distinct from product or process innovation. Comparing cases of high-BMI and low-BMI ventures, we examine the sources of these divergent outcomes. Our analysis suggests that teams have less impact on BMI than individuals. Our data reveal i...

The strong interest by academic scholars and managers in the business model concept has led to the proliferation of research on the subject by both academics and practitioners. Business models emphasize a system-level, holistic approach towards explaining how firms do business (not what, when or where). As such, a business model is the template ena...

Business model innovation requires legitimacy, but increased legitimacy raises the possibility of imitation. We examine how firms can balance legitimacy-imitation tension through two relevant theoretical lenses, institutional theory (legitimacy), and the resource-based view (imitation). We argue that firms can strategically design the content, stru...

Anchored in our research on business models, we delineate in this article a future research agenda. We establish that the theoretical and empirical advancements in business model research provide solid conceptual and empirical foundations on which scholars can build in order to explore a range of important, yet unanswered research questions. We dra...

Companies, the authors argue, are increasingly turning toward business model innovation as an alternative or complement to product or process innovation. Drawing on extensive research they conducted over the course of the last decade, the authors define a company's business model as a system of interconnected and interdependent activities that dete...

The paper provides a broad and multifaceted review of the received literature on business models in which we examine the business model concept through multiple subject-matter lenses. The review reveals that scholars do not agree on what a business model is, and that the literature is developing largely in silos, according to the phenomena of inter...

Where do firms’ heterogeneous resources come from? Our qualitative, inductive study of nascent firms over seven years revealed that founders’ differential use of emotion regulation actions can explain differential creation of social resources at the firm level. We found that founders’ emotion regulation actions cluster around three themes: (1) the...

Where do firms' heterogeneous resources come from? Our qualitative, inductive study of nascent firms over seven years revealed that founders' differential use of emotion regulation behaviors can explain differential creation of social resources at the firm level. We found that founders' emotion regulation behaviors cluster around three themes: 1) t...

We highlight business model innovation as a way for general managers and entrepreneurs to create and appropriate value, especially in times of economic change. Business model innovation, which involves designing a modified or new activity system, relies on recombining the existing resources of a firm and its partners, and it does not require signif...

Based on a four-year field study of six new ventures, we investigate whether and how founders of new firms engaged in affective sensegiving with diverse stakeholders; namely investors, board members, customers and employees. Affective sensegiving refers to founders' integrating affect in their verbal statements and actions to influence stakeholders...

Building on existing literature, we conceptualize a firm's business model as a system of interdependent activities that transcends the focal firm and spans its boundaries. The activity system enables the firm, in concert with its partners, to create value and also to appropriate a share of that value. Anchored on theoretical and empirical research,...

El origen de la innovación parece haberse desplazado desde el producto y el proceso hasta la organización de las actividades de una empresa. Si se considera esto, ¿qué debe tener en cuenta un directivo para abordar una innovación en el modelo de negocio?

Building on the received literature, we conceptualize a firm's business model as a system of interdependent activities that transcends the focal firm and spans its boundaries. The activity system enables the firm to create value in concert with its partners but also to appropriate a share of the value created. Anchored on theoretical and empirical...

Where do firms heterogeneous resources come from? Our qualitative, inductive study of nascent firms over seven years revealed that founders use of emotion regulation behaviors can explain differential resource creation at the firm level. These behaviors deal with three emotion-laden tensions that firm founders faced: (1) self versus other-orientati...

En este artículo, se hace hincapié en la innovación del modelo de negocio como una forma para que los directores generales y los empresarios generen nuevos ingresos y conserven los márgenes, concretamente en tiempos de cambios económicos. La innovación del modelo de negocio reside en la recombinación de los recursos existentes de una empresa y sus...

Based on a five-year field study of six new ventures, we investigate whether and how organization foun-ders use affective influence, a form of emotion management, with diverse stakeholders, namely investors, board members, customers, and employees. We found wide differences in founders' propensity to use affective influence actions and that not all...

Entrepreneurial activity in North America has steadily increased in the past few decades. For example, the rate of new business registrations in Canada approximately doubled between 1979 and 1989 alone. The entrepreneurial sector is particularly interesting because of its close relationship to innovation and technological progress and the perceptio...

We examine the fit between a firm's product market strategy and its business model. We develop a formal model in order to analyze the contingent effects of product market strategy and business model choices on firm performance. We investigate a unique, manually collected dataset, and find that novelty-centered business models—coupled with product m...

This study explores how entrepreneurs manage the emotions of internal and external stakeholders and how doing so affects their ability to create new organizations. Our data indicate that emotion management facilitates organizational building by helping founders mobilize resources, thereby enhancing the nascent company's resilience in dealing with n...

We focus on the design of an organization's set of boundary-spanning transactions - business model design - and ask how business model design affects the performance of entrepreneurial firms. By extending and integrating theoretical perspectives that inform the study of boundary-spanning organization design, we propose hypotheses about the impact o...

Results of a two-year inductive field study of British ventures show that entrepreneurs are more likely to acquire resources for new ventures if they perform symbolic actions—actions in which the actor displays or tries to draw other people's attention to the meaning of an object or action that goes beyond the object's or action's intrinsic content...

In this paper, we explore the fit between a firm's product market strategy, and its business model.

The expansion and development of global financial markets has led to a rapid rise in foreign IPOs and listings. As the opportunities for financing ventures have increased significantly, so has the complexity of decisions facing entrepreneurs and others who need to tap into these markets. When equity can be sourced virtually anywhere in the world, h...

The expansion and development of global financial markets has led to a rapid rise in foreign IPOs and listings. As the opportunities for financing ventures have increased significantly, so has the complexity of decisions facing entrepreneurs and others who need to tap into these markets. When equity can be sourced virtually anywhere in the world, h...

This paper explores how the dynamic capabilities of firms may be linked to differential firm performance within an industry. A formal model is presented in which dynamic capabilities are treated as a set of routines guiding the evolution of a firm's resource configuration. The model centers on the endogenous choice firms make between resource deplo...

A rationale based on adaptive learning is used to explain inefficient bargaining under private information. A dynamic bargaining model using genetic algorithms is developed in which independent but interacting negotiators coevolve their offers. A computer simulation analysis is conducted that compares bargaining outcomes under complete and incomple...

A working paper in the INSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.

We explore the theoretical foundations of value creation in e-business by examining how 59 American and European e-businesses that have recently become publicly traded corporations create value. We observe that in e-business new value can be created by the ways in which transactions are enabled. Grounded in the rich data obtained from case study an...

This paper investigates strategies for value creation of e-commerce companies. Our main assumption is that e-commerce fundamentally affects the way business is conducted across many industries. To support this insight, we discuss the unique characteristics of 'virtual markets' brought on by the Internet. Based on a survey of 30 European e-commerce...

and from participants at a faculty seminar at the Wharton School. We are particularly grateful to the Special Issue editors and two anonymous referees for their most helpful and constructive suggestions and comments.

The paper is concerned with communication within a team of players trying to react to information dispersed among them. The problem is nontrivial because they cannot communicate all information, but have to use coarse codes. The paper argues that members gain compatibility advantages by using identical codes, but that this may limit the ability of...

Thesis(Ph.D.) -- Univesrity of British Columbia, 1998 Photocopy s

This paper investigates the role of venture capitalists. We view their “raison d’être” as their ability to reduce the cost of informational asymmetries. Our theoretical framework focuses on two major forms of asymmetric information: “hidden information” (leading to adverse selection) and “hidden action” (leading to moral hazard). Our theoretical an...

by phone (Raphael Amit: (604) 822-8481, James Brander: (604) 822-8483), or by fax (both at: (604) 822-5350). Raphael Amit and James Brander are associated with the W. Maurice Young Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital (EVC). He is associated with the 3i Venturelab at INSEAD. The ordering of author names is alphabetical and is not intended to reflec...