Unveiling the Dark Side of Business Models: A Novel Framework for Managerial Cognition and Decision-Making

Decision-making has long been recognized as being at the core of organizational life. Yet, the cognitive mechanisms by which managers make decisions represent a critical field of exploration. In this context, business models (BMs) are cognitive representations of organizational architectures that managers use to orient their firms in the business environment. While BMs – as managerial schemas – have been extensively studied for their beneficial applications at the strategic level, scholarly attention has rarely focused on their dark side . In this chapter, we point out that BM thinking – that focuses excessively on established schemas – might narrow managerial cognition in the process of fine-tuning the current BM; in the process, opportunities for more radical BM innovation can be overlooked. We systematize March and Simon’s contribution on managerial cognition into a more comprehensive conceptual framework by integrating the perspectives of Kahneman, Baron, and Gollwitzer. The result is an epistemologically coherent framework for managerial cognition and decision-making that focuses on how managers can overcome cognitive biases that derive from a reliance on established BMs as schemas. We close this chapter with directions for further research.