The Factors Of Retail Business Model Innovation

In the current era of knowledge economy, innovation has become an driving force for enterprises to survive and develop, which is also significant to maintain the enterprises' core competitiveness. In the context of economic globalization, with increasing competitions among industry and customers' diversified and personalized demands, only enduring innovations can make enterprises to adapt to the changing economic environment. The economic crisis in 2008 forced our country to shift from the export-oriented to the inward-oriented, the traditional manufacturing enterprises and retail enterprises were also faced with the situation of transformation and upgrading, while rapid development of e-commerce just provided a turning point for these enterprises. Today's competition, not competition between products, but competition between business models, management guru Peter Drucker once said. Therefore, it's an inspiration and important reference for the research of enterprise business model innovation, especially online retail business model innovation.The concept of business model first appeared in the literature on the dynamic of IT industry, which has now become the key to success for companies; it's no exception for online retail business. So which factors were presented to influence business model innovation, and how to make them work?Based on the issues raised above, after looking up a large number of literatures, we found that researches regarding on influencing factors of innovation were focusing on technological innovation and service innovation; most business model innovation study focused on the re-combination of factors, it's rare to find the research on the influencing factors of business model innovation. Therefore, based on the special nature of the problem, we use a mixed research method in our exploratory study, which is, first obtained the theoretical framework by the qualitative research, and then do the further study on the previous validation through the quantitative research.First of all, case study method was selected in our qualitative research part. Taobao was chosen as the case study sample which is the leading online retail company in China. We introduced the computer-aided software Nvivo 8.0, used grounded theory research paradigm to encoding the innovative events of Taobao's three development phases, deeply analyzed its innovation system, and obtained the factors influencing retail enterprise business model innovation which are corporate culture, corporate strategies, technical support, employee creativity, competitors, partners, customers and external environments. Afterwards, through further quantitative study, we reach a conclusion that those 8 factors influenced business model innovation in varying degrees, and the conception discourse power was introduced as the indicator to measure the effectiveness of business model innovation.At last, based on the conclusions of this study, we put forward two proposals for traditional manufacturing enterprises and traditional retailers on how to achieve the transformation and upgrading by business model innovations according to the internal and external factors we obtained, which are that firstly the enterprises should strengthen their own self-cultivation and improve their innovation capability and secondly they should make great use of the external conditions and increase creative ways. Finally, the lack of this research and directions for future research are put forward.