Karl Taeuscher

Alliance Manchester Business School · Innovation Strategy and Sustainability

Entrepreneurial ventures strategically communicate information about themselves to convey their distinctiveness and attract favorable audience attention. In this study, we explore how the possession of quality-signaling resources, such as patents, influences the degree to which entrepreneurial ventures convey distinctiveness in their entrepreneuria...

Optimal distinctiveness research is a rapidly growing area of scholarship that integrates key theoretical insights from strategic management and institutional theory. Strategic management research highlights differentiation as a key driver of competitive advantage and superior performance, while institutional theory emphasizes conformity as a centr...

Research Summary How do new entrepreneurial ventures effectively deploy linguistic frames to attract customer demand? Drawing on framing and categories research, we develop and test theory about how category dynamics shape the effectiveness of two commonly observed frames—social impact framing and innovativeness framing—in the context of prosocial...

Research Summary Cultural entrepreneurship theory suggests that entrepreneurial narratives need to be optimally distinctive—neither portraying an offering as too similar to nor too distinctive from the conventions of its product category—for attracting superior demand. Building on and extending this literature, we propose that the benefits and down...

Geschäftsmodelle, die auf digitalen Marktplätzen basieren, haben in den letzten Jahren zahlreiche Industrien revolutioniert. Digitale Service-Marktplätze wie Airbnb, Uber oder Delivery Hero erregen große Beachtung, da sie auf stark skalierbaren Geschäftsmodellen basieren und daher rasante Wachstumsdynamiken erzielen können. Aus wissenschaftlicher S...

Research summary Optimal distinctiveness theory highlights that firms need to balance opposing pressures for differentiation (to gain competitive benefits) and conformity (to gain legitimacy). Yet, extant optimal distinctiveness research rarely considers that the pressure for conformity can substantially vary between competing firms. Studying the p...

How do new ventures gain legitimacy and attract critical resources? An increasing body of cultural entrepreneurship research highlights an “optimal distinctiveness” trade-off: new ventures need to be distinctive from their peers to stand out, yet distinctiveness counteracts the attainment of organizational legitimacy. In this paper, we challenge th...

Reputation represents an important driver of new venture performance. This article shows that the performance benefits of reputation are substantially contingent on ventures' market conditions. My study of 797,087 sales transactions by 5760 new ventures in 119 platform-mediated online markets provides strong evidence that market crowding attenuates...

Theory on the “Long tail effect” predicts that consumer demand in online markets spreads over a long tail of niche products. Recent research, however, provides opposing evidence and questions the theory’s validity. In this paper, I aim to reconcile these opposing findings by proposing that consumer uncertainty represents a hidden yet important boun...

Social approval assets like reputation and legitimacy drive stakeholders' choice of transaction partners and products. This paper draws on socio-cognitive perspectives to theorize about how reputation and legitimacy jointly influence consumers' purchase decisions. While previous studies argue that multiple social approval assets reinforce each othe...

Digital multi-sided platforms often compete through business model innovation. This article explores one instance of business model innovation – hybridization – in which an open platform adds a closed business model. We theorize about when and under which conditions such a strategic approach becomes more effective than a commonly suggested ‘get big...

The last decade has seen a rise in software-based platforms that engender entirely new ecosystems. In newly emerging platform markets, platforms compete for partners and customers in a rapidly changing environment. Yet, extant research mostly studies platforms' supply-side and demand-side strategies in relatively established platform markets. By co...

Why do some organizations in emerging categories capture more value than others? In emerging categories, organizations need to conform to multi-level institutional logics through sense-giving practices to overcome the lack of category legitimacy. While research on categories and institutional logics has fundamentally advanced our understanding of h...

Crowdfunding provides social entrepreneurs with an important approach to gain legitimacy and access to funding. Prior research has shown that crowd-investors reward a venture’s prosocial orientation. Yet, we lack an understanding of how social entrepreneurs strategically communicate such an orientation through narratives. This study explores the im...

The business model has evolved as an important concept in strategic management. While recent years have seen substantial progress in the business model’s conceptual development, empirical progress remains limited. I argue that this limited progress might be due to a mismatch between the business model’s characteristics and the methods applied to st...

Geschäftsmodelle, die auf digitalen Marktplätzen basieren, haben in den letzten Jahren zahlreiche Industrien revolutioniert. Digitale Service-Marktplätze wie Airbnb, Uber oder Delivery Hero erregen große Beachtung, da sie auf stark skalierbaren Geschäftsmodellen basieren und daher rasante Wachstumsdynamiken erzielen können. Aus wissenschaftlicher S...

The so-called sharing economy provides important opportunities for sustainable business activities. However, we lack information on whether and how sharing-based activities enable superior firm performance. We present a mixed methods study combining a multiple-case study and a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis that digs deeper into this to...

Entrepreneurial ventures increasingly aim at developing viable business models for solving societal or ecological challenges. Such business models for sustainability (BMfS) build on reinforcing mechanisms of value creation and capture that allow achieving financial and sustainability objectives simultaneously. To date, we do not know much about the...

Managers involved in business model innovation (BMI) encounter a series of cognitive challenges. Although cognition research provides important insights into how visual tools can reduce cognitive challenges, it does not address the effective design of business model tools. To advance our understanding in this area, this research applies a cognition...

Recent technological advances have enabled the emergence of novel platform business models based on digital marketplaces. Marketplaces like Airbnb or Uber offer platforms to connect previously unmatched demand-side and supply-side participants through innovative forms of value creation, delivery and capture. While countless firms claim to offer the...

Digital platforms increasingly determine the 21 st century business world. This is especially reflected in the development of multi-sided platforms such as Airbnb or Uber that depict the centerpiece of innovative business models as they effectively match demand-side and supply-side participants through advanced technologies. Such marketplace platfo...

Firms eager to succeed in the sharing economy are encouraged to imitate the strategies and business models of successful businesses like Airbnb and Uber. Yet they often ignore the lessons from sharing economy firms that failed with similar business models. Our analysis of several failed firms has identified common causes of failure, and the associa...

Advances in digital technologies have increased the possibilities for outsourcing business activities to crowds of independent contributors. Using the collective intelligence of a crowd opens a new range of business opportunities. In fact, crowdsourcing has led to the emergence of entirely new business models. Such crowd-based business models (CBBM...

Growth-oriented ventures face the challenge of focusing their limited resources on a suitable growth strategy. Extant research argues that successful startups build their growth strategy around reinforcing feedback loops. The “lean startup” literature suggests that entrepreneurs should identify the dominant feedback loop driving the growth of their...

To achieve sustainability, a firm has to transform its entire business logic. A business model for sustainability (BMfS) aims at creating value for various stakeholders and the natural environment. This article advances the current understanding of the basic functioning of BMfS by applying a systems perspective. Our BMfS understanding incorporates...

A key challenge for entrepreneurs is to find a robust and scalable business model. In complex environments, business model decisions often build on highly uncertain assumptions. The uncertainty increases when the entrepreneurial venture is confronted with unexpected changes in the environment. This paper proposes an approach to support entrepreneur...

Effective business models enable firms to achieve their strategic objectives. Past experiences, however, have shown that many promising business models failed because they could not appropriately deal with unexpected conditions. Several business model scholars have therefore argued that effective business models should exhibit a certain level of ro...

Business models are recognized as an important source of competitive advantage. Thus, literature increasingly focuses on the business model as an object for innovation. Consequently, various approaches towards innovating business models emerged over the last years. While these approaches offer an increasing repertoire of idea generating methods, th...

New business models can be generated through the combination of generic business model patterns. To our knowledge, however, no approach has classified and analyzed their common logic yet. In this paper, we aim to identify the underlying structure of business model patterns, in particular of those patterns related to revenue generation. First, we de...