Driving Factors Of Business Model Innovation For Platform Enterprises

Business model innovation is becoming one of the important sources for enterprises,especially platform enterprises,to gain competitive advantage.Lots of platform enterprises use innovative business models to gather resources to achieve rapid growth.This promotes the rapid development of the platform economy and consequently raises the attention of the business circles and the academia to the platform enterprise business model innovation.The existing researches have studied the factors that drive the innovation of business model from multiple perspectives.But many of them are fragmentations lacking of empirical support,or based on the traditional empirical analysis of universal view/contingency view,lacking of discussion on the relationship between multiple factors and the innovation of business model.Through literature review,this paper sets up an analytical framework for the business model innovation of platform enterprises driven by entrepreneur orientation and external environment.The qualitative comparative analysis(QCA)method is selected based on the configuration perspective.And 75 platform enterprise cases in CMCC are selected as samples to explore how internal and external factors jointly drive the realization of business model innovation.The research shows that entrepreneurs' innovative orientation,risk-taking orientation,forward-looking orientation and environmental dynamism,complexity and munificence cannot independently determine the appearance or type of business model innovation.But their combinations can drive platform business model innovation through several equivalent paths.In particular,the above factors drive novel business model innovation with eight configurations,which can be further summarized into four models: Beach Landing,Natural Innovation,Adversity Breakthrough and Entrepreneur-driven Innovation.There are seven configurations driving efficiency business model,which can be further summarized into three driving modes: Orienteering,Resource Utilization and Low-risk Transforming.Further analysis reveals that,facing similar external environmental characteristics,platform enterprises are influenced by different combinations of entrepreneur orientations to choose different types of business model innovation.And,the different driving characteristics as well as the way that entrepreneur responses to the environment,can explain the interesting results to some extent.