Business Model Innovation as Antecedent of Sustainable Enterprise Excellence and Resilience

Organizations are open systems operating under conditions of substantial turbulence, risk (known unknowns), and uncertainty (unknown unknowns) and seeking to balance stability and coherence with flexibility and change in pursuit of higher levels of efficacy and routine excellence. In addition, organizations exist, survive, and prosper on the basis of a sound value proposition and functional business model that helps unlock, capture, and redistribute in an efficacious manner the value added by the organization in question. Despite the increasing amount of literature on Business Model Innovation (BMI), a sound theoretical foundation is still missing, which is also true for the concept of Business Model (BM) itself. However, many scholars argue that a BM can provide a concise framework that explains how firms create and capture value, and clarify how enterprises monetize their innovations. This paper focuses on the effects that can be achieved through BMI, in particular organizational sustainability, resilience, and excellence. The main aim of the paper is to address how organization sustainability and resilience can be achieved with BMI and study the role of different factors in this process. In addition, the present case shows how BMI can be used to overcome commoditization challenges partly by moving from a BM focused on the trade of goods to a BM focused on the trade of tasks. The results show how manufacturers in developing countries can overcome their dependence on commoditized products and OEM manufacturing, while maintaining a sustainable ecosystem. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014