Business Model in the IS Discipline: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature

International audienceAlthough the Business Model (BM) concept provides a convenient unit for analyzing business practices, BM research in the Information Systems (IS) field reveals that there is a lack of consensus about definitions of the BM concept, and divergences and blurriness about the structure of such models. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive state of the art review of BM research in the IS domain, and so highlight important research avenues. We review the titles and abstracts of 115 papers, examine a subset of 54 significant papers, and code 28 separate definitions of the BM concept. Our work makes three main contributions. First, it up-dates previous literature analysis in BM in the IS discipline. Second, it helps alleviate the fuzziness associated with BM definitions, identifying BM essence, components, characteristics and functions as fundamental dimensions of the BM definition. Third it defines four main BM uses, so enriching research on BMs from different angles