Organizational change in response to environmental complexity: Insights from the business model innovation literature

Organizational change research to date has tended to proliferate on a conceptualization of change as a deliberate process driven by rational and formal strategic planning and fuelled by the expansion of exploitative resources. This conceptualization entails that change is essentially a process of reproduction in that it occurs along existing (incremental and cumulative) trajectories. Prompted by the need to manage increasingly complex and uncertain environments and foster progress towards sustainable development, the question of what are the exploratory forces that stimulate the capacity of business organizations to engage in discontinuous shifts towards new (flexible and creative) trajectories, without excessively disrupting existing ones, has comparatively been neglected. This paper contributes to address gaps in existing research by exploring how organizational change in response to complexity is framed in the literature on business model innovation. Three core categories of constraints to change are identified: relational flaws, functional flaws and the lack of moral motives; and three interacting forces that can be harnessed to overcome these constraints are suggested: sociability, agility and moral inclusivity. The resulting framework has broad implications for organizational change theory, practice, policy and research.