Introduction to the SEJ Special Issue on Business Models: Business Models within the Domain of Strategic Entrepreneurship

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1194
• Author: Xavier Lecocq,Joan E. Ricart,Benoît Demil,Christoph Zott
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015

INTRODUCTION TO THE SEJ SPECIAL ISSUE ON

BUSINESS MODELS: BUSINESS MODELS WITHIN

THE DOMAIN OF STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP

BENOÎT DEMIL1, XAVIER LECOCQ1,2*, JOAN E. RICART3, and

CHRISTOPH ZOTT3

1Lille Economics & Management, University of Lille, Lille, France

2IESEG School of Management, Lille, France

3IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

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 empirically investigates the phenom-

enon, and to inspire future research on the topic. In our introduction, we briefly review the main

conceptual developments of the past two decades. We highlight three contributions that busi-

ness model research is poised to make to the domain of strategic entrepreneurship, and, by

extension, to its constituent disciplines of strategy and entrepreneurship: (1) reconnecting

strategy with entrepreneurship; (2) suggesting a more central place for customers in our

frameworks and analyses; and (3) emphasizing the importance of implementation. We subse-

quently present the articles in this special issue and explain how they relate to these themes. We

conclude with suggestions for future research. Copyright © 2015 Strategic Management

Society.

INTRODUCTION

The business model has received increasing attention

since the late 1990s, driven partly by the opportuni-

ties for new Internet ventures and the need to explain

to potential stakeholders how sustained value would

be generated. Timmers (1998: 4) was one of the first

to suggest that ‘a business model includes an archi-

tecture for the product, or service, an information

flow, a description of the benefits for the business

actors involved, and a description of the sources of

revenue.’ Subsequently, researchers have drawn on

the notion of the business model to describe how

established firms can tap into new sources of value

creation and capture.

In the literature, the business model is not treated

as one homogeneous construct (i.e., not all scholars

agree on the same definition), but as a concept that

refers to various aspects of the underlying phenom-

enon (about which most scholars agree)—namely,

how firms do business at the system level (Zott,

Amit, and Massa, 2011). The answer to this question

of how to do business points toward sources of value

creation that are inherent in the business model

itself and can be accessed through it; these include

novelty, efficiency, complementarities, and lock-in.

These are distinct from the specific product or

service that the business model enables (Amit and

Zott, 2001).

Keywords: business model; strategic management; entrepre-

neurship; customer focus; implementation; design

*Correspondence to: Xavier Lecocq, University of Lille, 104,

Avenue du Peuple Belge, 59043 Lille Cedex, France. E-mail:

Xavier.Lecocq@iae.univ-lille1.fr

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Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 9: 1–11 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.1194

Copyright © 2015 Strategic Management Society