Business Model Innovation Leadership: How Do SME's Strategically Lead Business Model Innovation?
When SMEs practice business model (BM) innovation (BMI), leading strategically BMs through the innovation process can be the difference between success and failure to a BM. Business Model Innovation Leadership (BMIL) is however extremely complex to carry out especially to small and medium size enterprises (SME). There are so many opportunities, pitfalls and strategies to consider while "the business" has to be operated simultaneously. The paper provides a study of BMIL in practise in SMEs and show different ways of how they handle BMIL and BMIL strategies. The SMEs were examined through a framework model called the BMIL strategy canvas. The research approach was action research carried out from 2008 - 2012. Intense study of 35 US and EU SMEs and 97 of their different BMs form the empirical background. The findings represent learning and characteristic of BMIL with a strong reference to state of the art theory in BM and BMI. The research reveals that SMEs focus on very classic BMI approaches and BMIL strategies. SMEs focus in most cases on reactive "outside in and reactive "inside in" BMIL strategies. SMEs are primarily focusing on meeting needs and demands of an inside out "predefined" set of user and/or customer groups. SMEs are reacting to a specific customer or market demand but the BMIL strategies do often not put them in a better or more central strategic position in their market and industry - and in the BMI process. The research shows some common approaches about SMEs BMI and BMIL strategy - Specifically, 1) Most SMEs do not formulate explicitly a BMIL strategy - they are doing BMI rather blindly 2) Very few SMEs are structured about their BMIL strategy and BMIL strategy process 3) SMEs focus in their BMIL on very few and often the same building blocks of the BM - especially the building blocks value proposition, target customer and value chain (Internal) - often regardless of the actual specific BMIL task, market demand and context of BMI 4) SMEs often leaves big BM potential behind because they cannot see the potential and are often not able to capitalised upon these 5) SMEs is generally in lack of BMIL skills.