Evolution of the Business Model: Arriving at Open Business Model Dynamics

The business is an abstraction of the way in which value is created and delivered. The concrete representation is the business model, expressed by a group of artifacts built with different languages. It serves to describe, explain, analyze, design, and evaluate the business. The set of concepts, construction rules, artifacts, and languages required to express it, are defined by a Meta-Business Model (MBM). Multiple authors have proposed different MBMs, each one with a specific motivation and objective. Some of these MBMs are widely recognized and have been applied in contexts like innovation and entrepreneurship. Due to new challenges, such as sustainability, being faced by businesses and given new ways of producing and delivering value, like the sharing economy, Novel Complex Businesses (NCBs) are emerging. NCBs are businesses characterized by circular structures made out of numerous inter-related components, and by creating value out of the product/service schema. While existing MBMs fulfill certain purposes, they do not have the expressiveness required to describe NCBs precisely enough to describe and analyze them. This paper introduces an MBM with the concepts, construction rules, and graphical notation needed to represent NCBs. We also illustrate an NCB and present the results of the validation for our MBM.