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This conceptual paper extends the traditional view of disruptive change, which considers the effects of rivalry between an incumbent and new entrant firm, by examining the impact of disruption upon the ‘innovation ecosystem’ in its entirety – the group of organisations that collaborate in creating a holistic value proposition for the end-user. Following Adner’s “ecosystem-as-structure” perspective, we develop propositions that anticipate structural differences between incumbent and disruptive innovation ecosystems, and then review these propositions in the context of three historical, disruptive innovation cases; Bakelite (a synthetic plastic), microwave oven, and photocopier. Through these cases, we illustrate that the manner of innovation ecosystem reconfiguration is likely to depend on the design attributes of the product, as well as the type of disruption experienced. We conclude by reflecting upon contemporary cases of disruption enabled through digital technologies, and proposing a framework that can guide future research.

Purpose: The paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review of customer value concepts and distinguishes complex customer value from the various perspectives. It structures the themes and dimensions between the various approaches along the customer value main lines in the literature. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews current literature and illustrates different types of value representations through a case example. Findings: Based on a comprehensive literature review, a framework how to scholars can structure customer value constructs is presented. Originality/value: In business and management research a conceptual confusion prevails and this paper attempts to clarify different types of customer value to provide a better resolution tool for scholars.

The concept of the business model has been designed for aiding exploitation of the business potential of an innovation. This exploitation inevitably involves new activities in the organisational context and generates a need to select and arrange the resources of the firm in these new activities. A business model encompasses those resources that a firm has access to and aids in a firm’s effort to create a superior ‘innovation capability’. Selecting and arranging resources to utilise innovations requires resource allocation decisions on multiple fronts as well as poses significant challenges for management of innovations. Although current business model conceptualisations elucidate resources, explicit considerations for the composition and the structures of the resource compositions have remained ambiguous. As a result, current business model conceptualisations fail in their core purpose in assisting the decision-making that must consider the resource allocation in exploiting business opportunities. This paper contributes to the existing discussion regarding the representation of resources as components in the business model concept. The categorized list of resources in business models is validated empirically, using two samples of managers in different positions in several industries. The results indicate that most of the theoretically derived resource items have their equivalents in the business language and concepts used by managers. Thus, the categorisation of the resource components enables further development of the business model concept as well as improves daily communication between managers and their subordinates. Future research could be targeted on linking these components of a business model with each other in order to gain a model to assess the performance of different business model configurations. Furthermore, different applications for the developed resource configuration may be envisioned.

Despite the growing attention innovation ecosystems have received from scholars and practitioners, rather little is known about the crucial birth and expansion phases that these ecosystems experience. Through a single case in the complex product system (CoPS) environment, this paper investigates the development of an innovation ecosystem between 1980 and 2007. The findings demonstrate that the ecosystem’s birth phase includes sub-phases, namely, invention and start-up, where the ecosystem is reconfigured to find the appropriate form and the proper actors to satisfy the first customer’s requirements. Moreover, the duration of the expansion phase is found to be remarkably long, suggesting that within the CoPS setting, expansion may also include two or more sub-phases.