Direct and Configurational Paths of Strategic Orientation and Business Model Innovation to Successful Enterprise Performance

Abstract

With the advent of the digital economy, Chinese enterprises are facing major strategic opportunities for business practice. At the same time, in-depth digitalization has greatly unlocked the potential for innovation. Business model innovation has become a key path for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. However, the innovative situation in the digital age poses new challenges to the enterprises’ strategic change decision-making. How do enterprises sharply capture and quickly adapt to the dynamic changes of the environment, and further use business model innovation to achieve the strategic goal of achieving excellent performance, which is not only an important issue of concern to the theoretical scholars, but also a "secret" that enterprises’ management decision-making practices are constantly exploring. This study investigates how enterprises can achieve high levels of enterprise performance under different configurations of strategic orientation and business model innovation, which introduces efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model innovation as mediator, and a theoretical framework of "strategic orientation-business model innovation-enterprise performance" was established to explore the realization path of the strategic orientation’s effect mechanism on enterprise performance. It uses 245 data from Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, and other high-level enterprise managers in Northwest China as samples, besides that partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are used for empirical analysis of the data. The results provide support for the strategic orientation’s role for business model innovation and enterprise performance. Furthermore, different configurations of strategic orientation and business model innovation conditions lead to better enterprise performance.