The digital economy, underpinned by fundamental digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data, facilitates business model innovation, thereby enabling firms to achieve distinctive competitive advantages. While the digital economy creates more development opportunities for businesses, it also subjects them to higher levels of competitive threats. Therefore, business model innovation is both a proactive choice to perceive and exploit external opportunities and a reactive adaptation to identify and mitigate external threats. The digital economy drives business model innovation through digital information, internet platforms, digital technologies, and new business models and formats. As such, firms should utilize data resources innovatively to update their value logic, build digital ecosystems based on internet platforms, enhance digital technology integration to enable agile responses, and gain insights into emerging economic formats to promote cross-industry integration and innovation.
Based on a data-driven theoretical approach, this study utilizes Qingdao Internet of Food Co., Ltd. (IoF) as a study case to explore the mechanism of digital business model innovation within manufacturing enterprises. Employing a dynamic logic framework of “data-driven processes-dynamic capability enhancement-digital business model innovation,” this paper elaborates the process of digital business model innovation using the Grounded Theory. The findings indicate that realizing digital business model innovation is contingent upon the effective utilization of organizational data resources. Data-driven processes are crucial driving factors for digital business model innovation, unfolding through three critical stages: demand source identification, scenario chain linkage, and network sharing and interaction. These data-driven approaches significantly influence and enhance organizational dynamic capabilities, supporting the intermediary mechanism of data-driven processes as the antecedents to optimize the components of an enterprise’s digital business model. From a holistic generative perspective, digital business model innovation is realized through a dynamic process encompassing three dimensions: value proposition alignment, scenario experience optimization, and value network expansion. This study aims to offer theoretical insights and practical suggestions for business model innovation in the digital economy era.
In recent years, the internet business model has become a popular concept, and has been adopted by an increasing number of traditional enterprises. However, the question remains whether this adoption is a strategy-driven decision or a blind follow of trends. Therefore, this study is conducted on Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2020 to examine the existence, underlying motives, and economic consequences of peer effects in traditional enterprises adopting internet business models. The results show significant peer effects among traditional enterprises adopting internet business models. The examination of driving mechanisms reveals that peer effects of internet business models are more significant in enterprises with asset-light structures, higher degrees of virtualization, lower market valuations, and greater financing pressure, supporting the conceptual catering hypothesis rather than the strategic drive hypothesis. Further tests reveal that while adopting internet business models enables enterprises to receive some government subsidy and market reaction in the short term, it only promotes tactical innovation rather than real innovation and does not improve the financial performance of these enterprises. This further indicates that peer effects of internet business models are not a strategic drive but rather a matter of conceptual catering.
Business model innovation faces multiple tests of legitimacy. Most extant research in this area has been conducted from institutional and strategic perspectives while paying insufficient attention to the perspective of evaluators. Based on the institutionalization of China’s online car-hailing industry from 2012 to 2018, this paper analyzes the legitimacy judgment of the stakeholders from the perspective of evaluator categorization and explores the legitimation mechanism of business model innovation. It finds that evaluators judge the legitimacy of business models based on category cognition. Therefore, to achieve the bridging, spillover, and accumulation effects of legitimacy, the legitimation strategy of online car-hailing platforms should dynamically adapt to different evaluators, judgment models, and categorization standards. Ultimately, as quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, the legitimation of innovative business models is achieved in this way. In this process, stakeholders categorize and evaluate online car-hailing based on prototypes and value goals, and establish a two-way interactive mechanism, which is from behavior guided by cognition to cognition given feedback by behavior. This paper combines the legitimacy judgment with category theory to explain how individual cognition drives the emergence of new categories and identifies a series of legitimacy strategies based on categorization, thus providing theoretical support and practical inspiration for exploring the legitimation of business model innovation.