Business model innovation in incumbent firms ::a practitioners’ perspective and implications for entrepreneurship research

While business model innovations are critical to a company’s long-term survival, they are still poorly understood compared with other kinds of innovations. In this paper, we systematically investigate prior research and reframe business model innovation. We report on a discourse analysis of interviews with CEOs of small and medium enterprises from the tech industry, with the aim of recording their definition of business model innovation. This research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the meaning and process of business model innovation from a practitioners’ perspective. We derive implications for innovation and entrepreneurship scholars based on the responses analyzed. These findings open new directions for theory development and empirical studies in the business model and entrepreneurship literature