The business model construction process

The business model (or BM) is the latest in a long line of strategy analysis tools. In practice, practitioners and students alike are making massive but singular appropriation of the components of this concept-tool: how? How do they transform them? What contributions, but also what difficulties, can we identify? We met in 2011 for a first roundtable discussion at AIMS on the theme of "what is" the BM, and then in 2012 for a second roundtable discussion on the theme of "what does" the BM do. While we have noted the variety of representations of this concept-tool, the incompleteness of the theoretical foundations available or explored to deal with value, its creation, sharing or capture, and the diversity of the players involved in the process of inventing a business model, we wanted to delve more deeply, for this final round of our trilogy devoted to the BM, into the theme of the business model construction process.

How does the BM fit into the history of operational analysis frameworks in strategy? What can we learn from the evaluation of the BM tool by those who use it, whether students or practitioners? And how can we characterize the dynamic construction or mediation process engendered by this tool?

This third opus in our series of workshops on BM reports all the discussions on these issues on June 11, 2013, in Clermont-Ferrand.