Business Model Renewal: Process, Barriers and Drivers

We survey existing literature in the fields of business development, turnaround, strategic renewal, corporate entrepreneurship, business model innovation and organizational change, and synthesize a business model renewal process at established firms, identify key enablers and brakes, and discuss future empirical interventions. We find that business model renewal involves a consideration of capabilities to understand contingencies, access to entrepreneurially minded people, managerial competence, funding, and entrepreneurial activity creation and termination process. Moreover, attention should be directed towards the firm’s history, rationale for change, implementation and overall speed of the renewal process itself, and especially employees. The literature up till now has been surprisingly silent about the speed of business model renewal in particular. The proposed synthesis provides a valuable foundation for future empirical studies on how established firms can manage and accelerate the process of business model renewal in response to increasing environmental dynamics. Key scientific and practical implications are sketched out.