مدل های کسب و کار، استراتژی کسب و کار و نوآوری

Whenever a business enterprise is established, it either explicitly or implicitly employs a particular business model that describes the design or architecture of the value creation, delivery, and capture mechanisms it employs. The essence of a business model is in defining the manner by which the enterprise delivers value to customers, entices customers to pay for value, and converts those payments to profit. It thus reflects management's hypothesis about what customers want, how they want it, and how the enterprise can organize to best meet those needs, get paid for doing so, and make a profit. The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of business models and explore their connections with business strategy, innovation management, and economic theory.

Developments in the global economy have changed the traditional balance between customer and supplier. New communications and computing technology, and the establishment of reasonably open global trading regimes, mean that customers have more choices, variegated customer needs can find expression, and supply alternatives are more transparent. Businesses therefore need to be more customer-centric, especially since technology has evolved to allow the lower cost provision of information and customer solutions. These developments in turn require businesses to re-evaluate the value propositions they present to customers – in many sectors, the supply side driven logic of the industrial era has become no longer viable. This new environment has also amplified the need to consider not only how to address customer needs more astutely, but also how to capture value from providing new products and services. Without a well-developed business model, innovators will fail to either deliver – or to capture – value from their innovations. This is particularly true of Internet companies, where the creation of revenue streams is often most perplexing because of customer expectations that basic services should be free. A business model articulates the logic and provides data and other evidence that demonstrates how a business creates and delivers value to customers. It also outlines the architecture of revenues, costs, and profits associated with the business enterprise delivering that value. The different elements that need to be determined in business model design are listed in Figure 1. The issues related to good business model design are all interrelated, and lie at the core of the fundamental question asked by business strategists – how does one build a sustainable competitive advantage and turn a super normal profit? In short, a business model defines how the enterprise creates and delivers value to customers, and then converts payments received to profits.1 To profit from innovation, business pioneers need to excel not only at product innovation but also at business model design, understanding business design options as well as customer needs and technological trajectories. Developing a successful business model is insufficient to assure competitive advantage as imitation is often easy: a differentiated (and hard to imitate) – yet effective and efficient – business model is more likely to yield profits. Business model innovation can itself be a pathway to competitive advantage if the model is sufficiently differentiated and hard to replicate for incumbents and new entrants alike. In essence, a business model [is] a conceptual, rather than financial, model of a business. In essence, a business model embodies nothing less than the organizational and financial ‘architecture’ of a business.2 It is not a spread sheet or computer model, although a business model might well become embedded in a business plan and in income statements and cash flow projections. But, clearly, the notion refers in the first instance to a conceptual, rather than a financial, model of a business. It makes implicit assumptions about customers, the behavior of revenues and costs, the changing nature of user needs, and likely competitor responses. It outlines the business logic required to earn a profit (if one is available to be earned) and, once adopted, defines the way the enterprise ‘goes to market’. But it is not quite the same as a strategy: the distinction and the relationship between the two will be discussed later. Despite lineage going back to when societies began engaging in barter exchange, business models have only been explicitly catapulted into public consciousness during the last decade or so. Driving factors include the emerging knowledge economy, the growth of the Internet and e-commerce, the outsourcing and offshoring of many business activities, and the restructuring of the financial services industry around the world. In particular, the way in which companies make money nowadays is different from the industrial era, where scale was so important and the capturing value thesis was relatively simple i.e. the enterprise simply packed its technology and intellectual property into a product which it sold, either as a discreet item or as a bundled package. The existence of electronic computers that allow low cost financial statement modeling has facilitated the exploration of alternative assumptions about revenues and costs. Additional impetus has come from the growth of the Internet, which has raised anew, and in a transparent way, fundamental questions about how businesses deliver value to the customer, and how they can capture value from delivering new information services that users often expect to receive without charge. It has allowed individuals and businesses easy access to vast amounts of data and information, and customer power has increased as comparison shopping has been made easier. In some industries, such as the recording industry, Internet enabled digital downloads compete with established channels (such as physical product sales) and, partly because of the ubiquity of illegal digital downloading, the music recording industry is being challenged to completely re-think its business models. The Internet is not just a source of easy access to digital data; it is also a new channel of distribution and for piracy which clearly makes capturing value from Internet transactions and flows difficult for recording companies, performers and songwriters alike. More generally, the Internet is causing many ‘bricks and mortar’ companies to rethink their distribution strategies – if not their whole business models. Notwithstanding how the Internet has devastated the business models of industries like music recording and news, internet companies themselves have struggled to create viable business models. Indeed, during the dot.com boom and bust of 1998–2001, many new companies with zero or negative profits (and unprecedentedly low revenues) sought financial capital from the public markets, which – at least for a short while – accommodated them. Promoters managed to persuade investors that traditional revenue and profitability models no longer applied – and that the dot.com companies would (eventually) figure out (highly) profitable business models. Few have, causing one commentator to remark that ‘the demise of a popular but unsustainable business model now seems inevitable’.3 No matter what the sector, there are criteria that enable one to determine whether or not one has designed a good business model. A good business model yields value propositions that are compelling to customers, achieves advantageous cost and risk structures, and enables significant value capture by the business that generates and delivers products and services. ‘Designing’ a business correctly, and figuring out, then implementing – and then refining – commercially viable architectures for revenues and for costs are critical to enterprise success. It is essential when the enterprise is first created; but keeping the model viable is also likely to be a continuing task. Superior technology and products, excellent people, and good governance and leadership are unlikely to produce sustainable profitability if business model configuration is not properly adapted to the competitive environment. Some preliminary criteria for business model design are suggested throughout this article, and summarised in a later section. The concept of a business model has no established theoretical grounding in economics or in business studies.

All businesses, either explicitly or implicitly employ a particular business model. A business model describes the design or architecture of the value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms employed. The essence of a business model is that it crystallizes customer needs and ability to pay, defines the manner by which the business enterprise responds to and delivers value to customers, entices customers to pay for value, and converts those payments to profit through the proper design and operation of the various elements of the value chain. Put differently, a business model reflects management's hypothesis about what customers want, how they want it and what they will pay, and how an enterprise can organize to best meet customer needs, and get paid well for doing so. The goal of this article has been to advance understanding of the considerable significance of business models and to explore their connections to business strategy, innovation management and economic theory. One key conclusion of the analysis is that, to be a source of competitive advantage, a business model must be something more than just a good logical way of doing business. A model must be honed to meet particular customer needs. It must also be non-imitable in certain respects, either by virtue of being hard to replicate, or by being unpalatable for competitors to replicate because it would disturb relationships with existing customers, suppliers, or important alliance partners. A business model may be difficult for competitors to replicate for other reasons too. There may be complicated process steps or strong intellectual property protection, or organizational structures and arrangements may exist that will stand in the way of implementing a new business model. Good business model design and implementation involves assessing such internal factors as well as external factors concerned with customers, suppliers, and the broader business environment. to be a source of competitive advantage, a business model must be more than just a good logical way of doing business …. It must be honed to meet particular customer needs … The paucity of literature (both theoretical and practical) on the topic is remarkable, given the importance of business design, particularly in the context of innovation. The economics literature has failed to even flag the importance of the phenomenon, in part because of an implicit assumption that markets are perfect or very nearly so. The strategy and organizations literature has done little better. Like other interdisciplinary topics, business models are frequently mentioned but rarely analyzed: therefore, they are often poorly understood. Not surprisingly, it is common to see great technological achievements fail commercially because little, if any, attention has been given to designing a business model to take them to market properly. This can and should be remedied. Increased understanding of the essence of business models and their place in the corpus of the social and organizational sciences should help our understanding of a variety of subjects including market behavior, competition, innovation, strategy and competitive advantage. Our understanding of the nature of the firm itself, together with the role of entrepreneurs and managers in the economy and in society, should also benefit from a better appreciation of business models and their role in entrepreneurship, innovation and business performance. great technological achievements commonly fail commercially because little attention has been given to designing a business model to take them to market properly. This can and should be remedied.