Leveraging virtual business model innovation: a framework for designing business model development tools

Defining Virtual Consumerism Through Content and Sentiment Analyses

This study set out to better understand virtual consumerism (VC) by applying natural language processing (NLP) methods for sentiment and content analyses. A total of 318 articles related to VC were identified on theguardian.com Web site and analyzed by text mining methodology. A thematic, content analysis using the Leximancer program was performed to explore VC as a concept, and its related concepts and concept associations. For the purposes of "deep-dive insights," further content and sentiment analyses were performed with MonkeyLearn and valence aware dictionary for sentiment reasoning. This triangulation in methodology enabled a comprehensive unstructured qualitative data analysis. The study identified key themes that characterize and define VC. It uncovered that, although there is predominantly positive sentiment toward VC reported in The Guardian online articles, negative sentiment also exists, presenting challenges for the industry to maneuver. The findings reveal that in the context of VC, a virtual experience is also a social experience in a virtual space, which is becoming and evolving. There are certain industries and sectors that are embracing VC, such as marketing, advertising and public relations, software development/IT, art/design, and entertainment, as well as science/technology. Some sectors and industries are experiencing challenges, such as security/law enforcement and medical, and hence display negative sentiment toward VC. Overall, this study presents a working definition of VC, a synopsis of the state of VC, and highlights areas for potential research to further our understanding of this phenomenon. It contributes to an improved understanding of VC for the industry and academia, and provides impetus for future studies focused on the emergent VC-relevant conceptual relationships.

A Conceptual Approach for Business Model Innovation Including Strategic Simulations as Digital Prototypes for Decision Support

Business model innovations (BMIs) are a promising approach to be successful in hyper-competition. There are several approaches for the systematic development of BMI. Within these approaches, however, companies are faced with major challenges, especially, in the decision-making process. On the one hand, certain information is not available, and on the other hand, cause-and-effect relationships within the innovation networks or systems are not known. In certain contexts, simulations can close this gap. Thus, this paper addresses the research question of how simulations can be systematically integrated into BMI approaches. Therefore, BMI processes and different simulation applications are reviewed, the aspect of BMI prototyping is identified and an extended BMI approach is developed, which systematically integrates simulations.

Digital Entrepreneurship: Future Research Directions and Opportunities for New Business Model

Digital entrepreneurship is a technological advancement in infrastructure that creates various prospects for entrepreneurs. New digital enterprise models need attention in society, particularly concerning digital entrepreneurship opportunities, barriers, and success factors. Hence, this study gathers literature on digital entrepreneurship to compile methods and topics discussed by previous authors. Furthermore, this study illustrates research directions indicating opportunities for future scholars to work in this domain. A systematic approach across this study followed methodology and maintained a quality threshold by selecting 35 articles on digital entrepreneurship. Considering conceptual literature, the study identified six streams of digital entrepreneurship such as digital enterprise models, entrepreneurship procedure, strategical platform, ecosystem, entrepreneurship training, and social digital entrepreneurship. Hence, this study determines paths for recent research on digital entrepreneurship through a framework in different areas. Moreover, it also provides research opportunities through research directions to deeply understand the domain of digital entrepreneurship.

Explainable Ontology-Based Intelligent Decision Support System for Business Model Design and Sustainability

Background: Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a problem-solving paradigm that uses knowledge of relevant past experiences (cases) to interpret or solve new problems. CBR systems allow generating explanations easily, as they typically organize and represent knowledge in a way that makes it possible to reason about and thereby generate explanations. An improvement of this paradigm is ontology-based CBR, an approach that combines, in the form of formal ontologies, case-specific knowledge with domain one in order to improve the effectiveness and explanation capability of the system. Intelligent systems make daily activities more easily, efficiently, and represent a real support for sustainable economic development. On the one hand, they improve efficiency, productivity, and quality, and, on the other hand, can reduce costs and cut waste. In this way, intelligent systems facilitate sustainable development, economic growth, societal progress, and improve efficiency. Aim: In this vision, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new generation of intelligent decision support systems for Business Model having the ability to provide explanations to increase confidence in proposed solutions. Findings/result: The performance results obtained show the benefits of the proposed solution with different requirements of an explanatory decision support system. Consequently, applying this paradigm for software tools of business model development will make a great promise for supporting business model design, sustainability, and innovation.

Open Business Model Innovation via the Internet: How Wiki Technologies Can Improve the Quality of Business Models

Increasingly, firms follow the strategy of open business model innovation via the Internet. In this form of digital innovation management, firms make use of Internet platforms that allow them to integrate external customers and other stakeholders for (re-)innovation of their business models. However, the used IT tools on these Internet platforms suffer from not being able to merge the content of multiple users in an adequate way, thus the resulting business models suffer from low degrees of quality. Against this backdrop, in this research, we propose to equip these Internet platforms with a wiki technology. This would allow users to add to each other’s content, to make changes or to correct mistakes. In our action design research (ADR), we could empirically validate that this leads to a higher quality in terms of business models’ degree of elaboration. Since research that focusses on the design of Internet-based open BMI is still neglected, our research contributes to the literature base by being the first that answers ongoing open calls for research on this phenomenon of interest.

Developing a conceptual framework for the co-operative and mutual enterprise business model

The co-operative and mutual enterprise business model represents a unique type of organisation that has a dual purpose focused on both economic and social goals. For nearly two centuries it has played an important role in economic development, job creation and addressing market failures. However, despite its potential importance to economic development it has been largely ignored within the mainstream economics and management literature. This paper provides an overview of the nature of the co-operative and mutual enterprise business model and also proposes a business model framework or ‘canvas’ that can be used for research, teaching and strategic analysis.