Introduction: Business Models and Modelling Business Models

The business model topic has generated a lot of discussion since the phrase first gained currency in academic articles in the late 1990s (Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2011). This growing attention culminated in the 2010 Long Range Planning Special Issue that brought the field’s leading scholars together to answer questions about what the business model was and what was its purpose. A key point that emerged was that a business model is more than a statement of how “value is created and captured”; it is a “model” – and, like many other kinds of models – can appear in many guises and serve many purposes. These include being a “manipulable device” that can be used to help academics or managers understand the linkages between value creation and value capture more clearly; as well as being an artefact that can be used to convey knowledge about a business and its status to others (see, e.g., Baden-Fuller & Morgan, 2010; Morgan & Morrison, 1999; Teece, 2010). The Special Issue (and subsequent pieces) also re-emphasized the critical question of how changing technology influences business model choice (Chesbrough, 2010; Gambardella & McGahan, 2010) and the model itself (Baden-Fuller & Haefliger, 2013; Baden-Fuller & Mangematin, 2013); a shift of attention away from matters internal to the firm toward what happens at and beyond its boundaries, and the relationships between the firm and its customers (see, especially, Teece, 2010); and the role of the business model as an expression of the firm’s governance arrangements that span not just internally and backwards down the value chain, but all the way through to the customer (Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart, 2010).