انتقال مدل کسب و کار شرکت و شناخت درون سازمانی : مورد نوکیا

This article distinguishes between a firm’s corporate business model and business models of its various business units. Our aim is to provide new insights into how executives’ cognitive processes can influence corporate business model transformation decisions. We focus especially on top managers’ recognition of inter-organizational cognitions, that is, such cognitions about the firm and its businesses that are shared by the top managers and stakeholders of the firm in the industries and communities where it operates. We support our theoretical work with an historical case study of Nokia’s corporate business model transformation between 1990 and 1996, which proved highly successful. We find that its transformation involved using the current reputational rankings of Nokia’s businesses as selection criteria for which businesses to retain and which ones to divest – as well as the elimination of businesses which embodied business model elements which were attributed as factors in past business failures.

Increasingly, both strategy scholars and practitioners are using the term ‘business model’ to describe the logic of a firm, the way it does business, and how it creates value for its stakeholders. Much literature has been devoted to describing certain (case) firms’ business models, as well as to developing general conceptualizations of what business models are (Morris et al., 2005, Siggelkow, 2002, Amit and Zott, 2001, Zott and Amit, 2010 and Teece, 2010); the recent special issue of LRP being a case in point (Long Range Planning, 2010). However, while conceptual studies into the nature of the business model construct, empirical snapshots of particular firms’ business models, and prescriptive accounts of ‘how to’ innovate novel business models have proliferated ( Chesbrough, 2010 and McGrath, 2010), much less attention has been paid to firms’ business model transformations over time. The present article addresses this research gap by examining corporate transformation with respect to its business model – or business models, as a large corporation may be running several at any one time (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986). Our first purpose is to outline both the distinction and the links between what we call the ‘corporate business model’ on one hand and the business models of the corporation’s businesses (or business units) on the other. While earlier research has noted that firms may run multiple business models simultaneously (van der Meer, 2007, Chesbrough, 2006, Linder and Cantrell, 2001 and Smith et al., 2010), the linking of corporate level concerns to individual business units and their business models has so far been sparse. Especially, extant literature lacks understanding of how corporate business models evolve and transform in multi-business unit organizations – an arena where we wish to contribute. Second, along with our focus on an individual corporation’s transformation, we focus on a specific area that is particularly under-researched: the cognitive processes that influence corporate business model transformations. There is, of course, a wide extant literature dealing with the varied roles that managerial cognition can play in corporate strategizing in general (e.g. Walsh, 1995, Porac and Thomas, 2002 and Schwenk, 2002), and some research has also pointed to the role of managerial cognition in firms’ business model evolution in particular (Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000, Tikkanen et al., 2005 and Chesbrough, 2010). Yet the cognitive drivers of the strategic transformation of corporate level business models have not so far received much attention. This is especially true when it comes to inter-organizational cognitions, which we see as those understandings about the role of the corporation and its businesses that are shared by the corporation’s managers and by its stakeholders in the communities where it operates. Our case company analysis shows that they can have considerable influence on the transformation of a corporation’s business model. From an evolutionary perspective, the competitive success of an individual firm depends ultimately on its ability to transform the elements of its business model in rhythm with, and towards a ‘fit’ with (i.e., success in) its external business environment (Siggelkow, 2002 and Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000). As to our empirical research, hence, we study a most instructive case – from which much can be learnt about corporate business model transformation in a dynamic environment, and how it is driven by cognitions. That is the case of a multi-unit corporation whose corporate business model transformation has led to considerable global success: Nokia Corporation, the Finnish mobile communications giant. Nokia’s story is an illuminating example of how a traditional diversified conglomerate managed to transform its corporate business model rapidly (during 1990–1996) into one with fewer businesses, exclusively related to mobile communications, and consequently (1996–2007) achieved unprecedented, decade-long global success in the telecommunications industry. Even though Nokia has recently (2008–2011) experienced problems in its industry (which are beyond the scope of the present study), we believe that an historical study of Nokia Corporation’s original 1990s transformation is highly instrumental for developing theoretical ideas about business models, strategic transformation/change and managerial cognition, as well as in providing practical lessons for managers facing similar situations.

The broad view that emerges from our study of Nokia’s corporate business model transformation is that corporate top managers can make their decisions about changing the composition of their corporation’s businesses and the value-creating links between them based, in part, on their recognition of inter-organizational cognitions. In Nokia’s case, the cognitions that drove or influenced their strategic transformation choices included, inter alia: new, emerging corporate recipes deemed more legitimate among key stakeholders that were internalized and taken into account at a time of corporate crisis; the current reputational rankings of the corporation’s businesses in their respective industries; beliefs about shared current boundary elements between businesses (i.e., currently complementary products and customers); and the elements of some existing unit’s business models to which they attributed ‘failure’. Naturally, a single case study like this cannot lead to definitive conclusions as to whether the top managers of firms in general tend to be influenced by the inter-organizational cognitions in the same way that Nokia’s executives were in their corporate business model transformation. In other corporations, such transformation may be more influenced by, for example, pursuit of businesses with the best prospective (as opposed to current) reputational rankings, or less by new corporate recipes emerging from investors (which might turn out to be mere fads). We also do not claim that, even at Nokia, inter-organizational cognitions – or managers’ basing their decisions on them – can explain corporate business model transformation in its entirety. Moreover, although in Nokia’s case, the exercise ended up being enormously successful (judging by its success in the global mobile communications markets post-1996), we cannot definitively conclude whether or to what extent the success of the transformation depended on its executives basing their transformation decisions on inter-organizational cognitions. However, given that success we can argue that basing the executive transformation decisions partially on inter-organizational cognitions was not deficient, either. In this sense, we do not support the notion that managers’ cognitive decision heuristics will inevitably be a source of biased judgments or errors (cf. Tversky et al., 1982). Instead, we argue that certain cognitive heuristics in strategic decision-making may actually lead to fairly smart decisions (cf. Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999). In Nokia’s case, indeed, the proposed cognitive processes led a corporation, which was struggling for survival, to select and further develop the businesses (and business models) that not only saved the corporation from demise but also enabled its great success under its redesigned corporate business model. In sum, the research contributions of our study are clear. First, while most prior business model studies have focused (explicitly or implicitly) on business unit-level business models, we focused on and provided a definition for the corporate-level business model. Second, instead of concentrating on snapshots or maps of firms’ business model structures (or components of the business model concept) as much earlier research has done, our study provides insights into how different corporate business model elements are dynamically linked and transform over time. Finally, and most importantly, our study is – to our knowledge – among the first ones to examine the role of inter-organizational cognitions in corporate business model transformation, or in strategic corporate transformation in general. Indeed, whereas most extant research on managerial cognition has focused on executives’ firm-internal cognitions (such as ‘mental models’, ‘cognitive maps’, or ‘world views’), we took into our focus the inter-organizational cognitions present in the industry fields and communities where the firm operates (Porac and Thomas, 2002 and Porac et al., 2002). Thus, our research provides novel insights into executives’ (re)cognitions about inter-organizational cognitions – especially when it comes to the effects such cognitions have on a firm’s strategic decisions. Besides examining our findings with larger firm samples, future research may find it valuable to pay further attention to the triggers of corporate business model transformation, so as to identify further contextual, environmental or cognitive factors that trigger corporate business model transformation (i.e., the move from the second to the third box of Figure 1). The main trigger in the Nokia case was the corporate crisis and looming bankruptcy precipitated by the severe problems of some of its business units – as well as the ensuing problems of seeking a top management consensus to alter the corporate business model to fit a new legitimate recipe. Future research could also identify the relative occurrence and roles of other triggers, such as those related to the identification of opportunities in the environment, the personal charisma of top managers, or the initiatives of other stakeholders than managers (or investors).