The contribution of business model innovation to collaborative entrepreneurship between SMEs: a review and avenues for further research

Providing theoretical support for the contribution of business model innovation (BMI) to collaborative entrepreneurship research, this study conducts a literature review and sheds light on the future research directions with a specific focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Although inter-firm collaboration has been recognised as a key growth strategy, entrepreneurship fulfilment as an objective of cooperation still needs more research and development. Similarly, despite the acknowledgement of usiness model (BM) as a useful conceptual tool to describe the logic of firms' value creation, it still remains somewhat unclear how firms can embrace innovation through their BMs. Over and above this, the interaction between BMI and collaborative entrepreneurship seems indeed a promising avenue, as in this study, four ways of their potential interconnections have been detected: 1) the inclusion of collaboration in identifying the elements of BM; 2) the implication of collaboration for BMI typology; 3) the linkage between innovation and entrepreneurship as the key components of BMI and collaborative entrepreneurship, respectively; 4) BMI as a criterion for evaluation of firms' entrepreneurial performance during and after collaboration. The paper ends with several limitations and future research directions.