Facilitating business model transformation : theory, operators, and patterns

Understanding Business Models (BMs) has become an essential capability for organizations seeking to drive growth, revitalize a lagging core or defend against industry disruption. However, this concept still has multiple interpretations, as it is often intertwined with others, like business strategy (BS), making it difficult for stakeholders to understand and re-design their own BMs. In fact, current tools including taxonomies, have encountered difficulties in providing mechanisms to guide this process. Seeking to contribute with the strengthening of the theoretical basis and with tools to transform BMs, in this work, we follow a Design Science Research (DSR) approach to provide a theoretical foundation for the concepts of BM, Business Model Patterns (BMPs), and BS under a formal conceptual representation. In doing so, we propose a language to describe a BM and we introduce a set of mechanisms to transform BMs. Finally, we provide a collection of BMPs that serve as the foundation for the application of these mechanisms. Thus, we aim to contribute to the development of a solid knowledge base to be used as a source of inspiration when restructuring, specializing, or creating new BMs.