Business Model Innovation, Building Resources and New Ventures’ Performance

Chi Kaoxun; Shao Yueting

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20191107.001

Summary

Information technology continues to spawn emerging industries and accelerate the integration of traditional industries. Under this background, business model innovation plays an increasingly important role in business competition environment, and greatly enhances the chances of new ventures surpassing the survival crisis and achieving rapid growth. Despite this, many new ventures have failed to pursue business model innovation. Therefore, it is of great value to explore the practical problem of “why some new ventures perform well in business model innovation, while others do not”. Current scholars mainly answer this question based on the resource-based view, and adopt the contingency perspective to analyze different types of resources as the moderator on the relationship between business model innovation and new ventures’ performance. However, the types of resources are inherently difficult to exhaust, and as a result, the conclusion of these studies are fragmented and unsystematic. Besides, resources themselves cannot be directly used by new ventures to explore the value of business model innovation; in addition to acquiring key resources, new ventures must effectively combine these resources to form a resource structure so as to capture business model innovation performance. In response to these inadequacies, it is necessary to further examine the role of different resource structures in exploring the value of business model innovation for new ventures. The resource management theory can provide rich enlightenment. The theory holds that the resource structure is formed in the building resource activity of new ventures, and different building resource approaches will create different resource structures. This means that different building resource approaches adopted by new ventures are the more essential reason for the differentiated outcomes of their business model innovation performance. In view of this, based on the resource management theory, this paper embodies the above-mentioned practical problems into the following theoretical problem: how does the new venture building resource approach affect the performance of business model innovation? Further, this paper constructs a model of the impact mechanism of business model innovation on new ventures’ performance, focusing on the role of the three building resource approaches—stabilizing, enriching and pioneering—in the influence process, and revealing the inherent relationship between business model innovation, building resources and new ventures’ performance. Through the empirical analysis of the survey data on 142 new ventures, this paper finds that:（1）business model innovation is conducive to improving new ventures’ performance, while the building resource approach adopted by new ventures will weaken or enhance the performance of business model innovation;（2）if new ventures adopt the stabilizing building resource approach and insist on carrying out activities based on the traditional resource structure, the performance of business model innovation will be weakened;（3）if new ventures adopt the enriching building resource approach and innovate the traditional resource structure steadily, the performance of business model innovation will be enhanced;（4）if new ventures adopt the pioneering building resource approach and construct a highly innovative resource structure, the performance of business model innovation will have no significant changes. The results show that in order to improve the performance of business model innovation, new ventures should adopt the enriching building resource approach. By measuring the value and external acceptance of new resources objectively, and gradually changing the traditional resource structure, the enriching building resource approach can effectively support the implementation of business model innovation.