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What drives Business Model Transformation in small and medium sized enterprises? : empirically assessing the roles of business environment and strategic agility

Kutscha, Julian (2016) What drives Business Model Transformation in small and medium sized enterprises? : empirically assessing the roles of business environment and strategic agility.

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Abstract:In recent years, firms are experiencing challenging shifts in their business environments. Technological developments and changing patterns of customer demand severely shorten the live spans of the prevailing business models. In order to survive and expand in such turbulent environments, firms must constantly question their established routines and processes. However, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are alarmingly unaware of the business model concept and dedicate little attention to business model innovations (BMIs). As a starting point to overcome this challenge, it is crucially important to accurately identify both, the environmental factors that necessitate business model changes, and the internal firm capabilities to conduct them. By referring to the Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) literature as well as to the largely case study driven literature stream on business model innovations, the study in hand recognizes seven potential influence factors for business model transformations in incumbent SMEs. To empirically verify these factors, an internet-mediated, quantitative survey among executive managers of 89 German SMEs (net response rate: 10.80\%) was conducted. Subsequently, the resulting data was analyzed using a Partial Least Squares Regression (PLS-R) approach to handle multicollinearity related problems. The results indicate that four factors, namely, Strategic Sensitivity, Resource Fluidity, Market Turbulence and Technological Turbulence, are significantly related to the degree of Business Model Innovativeness for at least one size class of firms (differentiating micro, small and medium sized firms). Given the lack of quantitative studies in the field, this thesis contributes to the literature by supplying empirical findings that are not limited to certain cases or specific industries. Also, the originality of this work is expressed by the fact that it is the first to empirically conceptualize environmental turbulence in the context of business model innovation.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/69705
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