Recently, Assistant Professor Wang Liyan from the Business School of Hunan University, as the first author, published her research findings on the top journal in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship management, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, with the title of "Digital technology-based business model design and innovation to address grand challenges: A process model".
The Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal is one of the 50 important academic journals in business and management recognized by the UK's Financial Times (FT50), and it is also one of the top journals in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship research. The co - authors of this paper are Professor Zhang Wei from Tsinghua University, Associate Professor Steven White from Tsinghua University and the Asian Institute of Technology, and Lecturer Fan Hang from North China Electric Power University.
Research Summary
The question of how a new venture designs and innovates on its business model (BM) to leverage digital technology to address multiple grand challenges has received little attention in the literature. We address this through a longitudinal case study of a new social enterprise in China. We develop an accessing-embedding-strengthening-expanding process model of BM design and innovation by which a venture may increase both the scale and scope of its impact as a complementor in ecosystems addressing grand challenges. We identify the specific actions and contingencies underlying this process. Our findings contribute to the understanding of BM design and innovation based on digital technologies and propose that assessment of a BM's impact on grand challenges may be in terms of scope as well as scale.
Managerial Summary
How may founders build a BM that exploits a technology's potential to address diverse sustainability challenges? Our study derives insights from one for-profit Chinese venture whose founders had the explicit objective of leveraging remote sensing data and analytics to address important and diverse social and environmental challenges. We identify the steps in its ecosystem-based strategy (accessing, embedding, strengthening, and expanding) by which the founders targeted and entered successive application ecosystems as a complementor. This strategy has enabled them to achieve financial goals and also increase their contribution to sustainability objectives in terms of both scale (vis-à-vis one grand challenge) and scope (across multiple grand challenges). We also identify the specific questions that the founders had to answer in the process of executing this strategy.
Wang Liyan is an assistant professor of organizational innovation and strategy department at the Business School of Hunan University. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Tsinghua University and her PhD in management from the Department of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management. She also had the opportunity to visit as a doctoral researcher at the Stern School of Business, New York University. Her research and teaching are mainly focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as corporate strategic management. Her research findings have been published in high-level academic journals at home and abroad, including Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (FT50), International Journal of Technology Management, Science of Science and Management of S.& T., as well as high-quality business practice publications such as Harvard Business Review (digital articles) and Tsinghua Business Review.
