Rethinking business models for innovation

One of the major challenges confronted by those in charge of technological innovation involves anticipating the value creation model sufficiently early on,in a highly uncertain context both as far as the technology itself is concerned and the potential market. Today, in many industrial sectors, the innovation boundaries have moved towards projects that are more and more exploratory and fuzzy. The simple optimisation of linear processes of the "stage-gate" type is no longer sufficient to build sustainable competitive advantages. The notion of Business Models, when applied to innovation, enables us to describe how a company creates value through innovation, generally within a business ecosystem, and how the value will be distributed between the actors involved. The authors of this book believe that the notions of Business Modelling and value creation are key to all the dimensions of successful innovation, whether technology, marketing, organisational or economically based. Rethinking Business Models for Innovation: this title describes the relationship between thinking, modelling, and also field-testing. The book is based on a series of nine recent cases of innovation involving company managers, often assisted by researchers (the co-authors of each chapter), and how they built and formalised their Business Models and then tested their strategies. After having discovered the variety of the cases, the reader will understand that every innovation situation generates specific questions about Business Models. However, we feel that we can identify three key issues that arise, more or less, in each of these projects. The chapters in this book build on these issues: the identification of sources of value and revenue models (the notion of value creation), the position of the company in the value-network or ecosystem (the sharing of value) and finally the evolution of Business MoDdels over time (the sustainability and the competitiveness of the company). The last chapter goes over all the contributions, exploring the notion of value in the Business Model approach.