Exploring business model innovation in SMEs in a digital context: Organizing search behaviours, experimentation and decision‐making

Abstract

In today's business environment, digitalization plays a key role in establishing competitive advantage and developing new business models. However, little is known about business model innovation (BMI) processes and practices of small and medium‐sized enterprise (SMEs) in their digital venturing. Thus, the aim of this paper is to address this research gap by investigating the process activities of SMEs in effectively building new business models through digitalization. Through a case study of 18 SMEs, document studies and 36 interviews, we explore the BMI processes during the case companies' digital transformation. The research results identify four critical BMI process activities: (1) assessing the environment in search of new opportunities, (2) conveying a sense of urgency, (3) exploring and testing new opportunities through experimentation and (4) handling decision‐making with a combination of intuition and data. Finally, our study reveals managerial implications related to data‐driven decision‐making during BMI, constituting four managerial dilemmas: (1) prognosis and scenario‐driven search myopia, (2) timing and sustainability, (3) radical shift from traditional experimentation to data‐based methods and (4) using intuition versus data‐driven decision‐making.