Comparison of Business Development Processes: A Literature Review Defining Structural Elements and Influential Factors

Companies are struggling to maintain revenue streams and growth continually. The management of new business opportunities has become an entrepreneurial key-challenges and enterprises are seeking to build up specific competencies accordingly. Business Development (BD) is expected to provide the answers in how to identify and manage business opportunities for potential growth. However, there is only little theoretical understanding about the concept of BD and the underlying BD process yet. Based on a comprising literature review, we identified 9 BD process models which we compared and analyzed. We then created a comprehensive BD process framework with the categories orientation, exploration, evaluation, implementation and commercialization where we reflect the identified 43 process elements, the 2 meta-process elements and the 6 influential factors. As a result, we found five findings. First, the process models differ in structure, completeness and granularity. There are differences in the sequential order of specific BD process elements depending on the industry type. Second, we identified definitions defining BD and sales as different organizational constructs. Third, despite a larger cluster of process elements around the topic opportunity management a holistic opportunity management concept is not described in the literature. Fourth, evidence was given that the BD process has a significant interdependency to the innovation process and to the concept of business model innovation (BMI). In both cases a precise description of the interface concept linking the processes was not provided. Finally, we recognize six influential factors on the whole BD process. We provide and explorative and first-time comparison of the available BD processes in literature and we are shedding light into the limited theoretical understanding of BD processes.