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Scientometrics (2017) 111:869–887 DOI 10.1007/s11192-017-2266-5

Exploring evolution and emerging trends in business model study: a co-citation analysis Xuerong Li1 • Han Qiao1 • Shouyang Wang1,2

Received: 29 May 2016 / Published online: 7 March 2017 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2017

Abstract This paper is an early attempt of using co-citation analysis to sort out and to analyze the development and evolution of a latest hot area, business model. A dataset of 1498 records published between 1995 and 2015 is collected from Web of Science database. The empirical results show the latest hot topics in the business model study focus on business model innovation and value creation. In addition, technology oriented articles and strategy oriented articles provide some of the main perspectives of business model study. The conclusions and implications of business model in this paper will be particularly illuminating for both academic research and enterprises’ practice application. Keywords Business model  Evolution  Co-citation network  Cluster analysis

Introduction Since 1990s, an increase number of researchers and practitioners have started to notice the significance of business model. Business model can be intuitively defined as a representation of how a company doing business. Some researchers (Zott et al. 2011; Wang et al. 2016) take the attitude that the concept of business model became prevalent after the rise of

& Han Qiao [email protected] Xuerong Li [email protected] Shouyang Wang [email protected] 1

School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongguancun East Road 80, Beijing, China

2

Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongguancun East Road 55, Beijing, China

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the Internet and information technology in the 1990s. Operations of a business had become more complicated, changeable and varied due to the information revolution. It is generally agreed that the key factors for the success of a business are not simply regarding products, brands and services—the more crucial factors are business models. Many of well-known Internet enterprises have shown that, successful business models can either extricate themselves from the difficult position of the dotcom bubbles, or can give them competitive advantages within intense competitions. With the impact of Internet and big data seeping into virtually all industries, brick-and-mortar companies also need to consider how to reform their business models adapting to the environment of Internet, and even creating new business models. As a result, ‘‘business model’’ has become a common term among enterprises and academies, and gained much attention from people of various domains. According to an initial survey of literature, the term ‘‘business model’’ appeared for the first time in an academic article in 1957 (Bellman et al. 1957), and first appeared in the title and abstract in 1960 (Jones 1960). However, the number of literature on the subject of business model published on top journals of economic or management such as Harvard Business Review hadn’t stepped into the period of rapid growth until 1999. Not only the number of published articles exploded, conference sessions and panels on the subject of business models have often been much, if not the most, crowded. Although business model study has been prevailing for nearly 20 years, researchers and practitioners have yet to develop a relatively unified definition and self-consistent logical structure. Business model can be composed of several core aspects of a business, including purpose, business process, target customers, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, trading practices, operational processes and policies. Consequently, it is rather arduous to conclude a comprehensive definition of business model. When considering related issues of business model, most enterprises have merely a vague understanding of the implication, but cannot appropriately learn, master and apply. Meanwhile, Zott et al. (2011) observed that researchers frequently adopt idiosyncratic definitions that fit the purposes of their own studies but that are difficult to reconcile with each other. Under such circumstances of generous literature and the lack of unified framework, a scientometric analysis of academic articles published on top journals may be beneficial to formalize business model research. This study represents an initial step towards understanding the history and evolution of business model study. In doing so, a co-citation analysis of literature published on top journals of management, business, operational science and other areas is conducted. A scientometric tool of Chen (2006) is used to detect and visualize emerging trends and transient patterns in academic articles on the subject to business model. Another objective of this study is to conclude future trends by identifying landmarks and turning points during the evolution of business model study. Our intended contributions in this study are twofold: (1) it is an early attempt of using co-citation analysis to provide the comprehensive and up-to-date emerging trends and crucial turning points of the latest hot area, business model. As a key factor of firm success, business model has been the focus of substantial attention from practitioners while the academic research of the area seems to lag behind practice (Zott et al. 2011). (2) This study represents a systematic approach based on scientometrics to gather divergent and vast literature of an emerging field of research. The descriptive statistical analysis of publications, citations, research area and institutions depicts a state of art of the research development, while the co-citation analysis of various types of nodes identifies the crucial achievements that contributed to the area, as well as the evolution of hot topics during some certain periods. The methodology and conclusions in this paper will be particularly illuminating for both academic research and enterprises’ practice application.

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The rest of the article is organized as follows. ‘‘Literature review’’ section describes a literature review and summarizes some related work. The methodology of this article is presented in ‘‘Methodology’’ section. ‘‘Descriptive statistical analysis’’ section conducts the descriptive statistical analysis of business model articles. ‘‘Co-citation analysis’’ section shows the main results of clusters and visualizations of co-citation analysis. Finally, ‘‘Conclusions and implications’’ section concludes with emerging trends of business model and proposed some further directions of future research.

Literature review Co-citation analysis routinely includes an essential procedure of identifying clusters of ‘‘co-cited’’ references or authors by creating a link between two or more references or authors when they co-occur in the reference lists of citing articles (Raghuram et al. 2010). The research on co-citation analysis has developed into two main streams: reference cocitation and author co-citation. The former was originally introduced by Small (1973) as a new measure of the relationship between two documents. It is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together by other documents. The later was proposed for the first time by White and Griffith (1981), who identified influential authors and display their interrelationships from the citation record. Soon after the proposition of cocitation analysis, the question has been raised whether in this way the entire specialty, or only a subgroup of publications of the specialty is identified (e.g., Sullivan et al. 1977). In order to evaluate the nature and magnitude of some of the limitations of co-citation analysis, Callon et al. (1983) developed co-word analysis to describe the interactions which exist between different phases of the innovation process and to show if basic research or applied research is the moving force. Scientometric analysis of co-citation network has been adopted in various disciplines to identify and visualize the emerging trends and crucial turns of a scientific field. Chen et al. (2012) conducted a research on emerging trends in regenerative medicine based on a scientometric analysis. Wang et al. (2012) focused on co-cited references of decisionmaking under uncertainty and discussed evolution and emerging trends of research on the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Mustafee (2011) employed co-citation analysis to identify prominent articles, authors and journals being referenced to by the two leading information science journals- EJIS and MISQ. A recent application of co-word analysis concerned with dynamics of the evolution of the strategy concept and how consensus regarding it has evolved in the academic community during the stages of its historical development (Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martin 2012). Although some researchers have provided systematic reviews of business model literature, scientometric analysis of business model has rarely appeared in academic journals before. Osterwalder et al. (2005) proposed five phases in the evolution of business model literature and provided the brief focus of each phase. George and Bock (2011) reviewed prior research and reframe the business model with an entrepreneurial lens. Klang et al. (2014) provided a systematic review before extending the literature on business models through theorizing on the core of the concept along the dimensions of classification, constitution and configuration. Zott et al. (2011) provided a broad and multifaceted literature review and found emerging common themes among scholars of business model. Wirtz et al. (2016a, b) both applied an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of business model literature. Some researchers explored the relationship between business

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model and a particular discipline, such as marketing (Coombes and Nicholson 2013) and air transport (Bergiante et al. 2015), using bibliometric approaches. Yet none of them investigated the co-citation network and evolution of hot topics in the timeline view. Discussing the evolution and emerging trends of the business model concept in a scientific basis will be beneficial to academic future research as well as enterprises’ practice application.

Methodology The methodological process is described based on four essential stages: (1) descriptive statistical analysis; (2) clusters analysis and turning points analysis on co-cited articles; (3) turning points analysis on co-cited authors; (4) time-zone analysis on co-cited keywords. Empirical results in ‘‘Descriptive statistical analysis’’ and ‘‘Co-citation analysis’’ sections will be arranged as the same order. Descriptive statistical analysis depicts a state of art of the research development, which involves overall analysis of publications and citations distributions during the sample period, research area analysis of published journals, and influenced institutions as well as cooperation network analysis. Co-citation analysis is mostly conducted by co-citation clusters, which are regularly visualized in the form of networks based on some latest visualization techniques, which helps to identify frequently co-cited papers, authors and journals more credibly and provides important insights into knowledge domains. In co-citation network of this study, a node represents an article, author or keyword, and a link between two nodes means the two articles, authors and keywords have been co-cited by another article. According to Chen (2004), three types of nodes should be identified in a co-citation network: (1) landmark, (2) hub, and (3) pivot nodes (see Fig. 1). A landmark node has a large radius, which means it has been cited by other articles in a highly frequency, thus represents a landmark or an important milestone in a research area. A hub node has a relatively large degree, which means it is widely co-cited by a large number of other articles and has made a wide scope of contribution. Pivot nodes are exclusive joints of two different clusters or the gateway of two clusters, which represents a turning point of two

Fig. 1 Three types of visually salient nodes (Chen 2004)

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groups of articles which may have different topics. Thus the pivot node made a contribution that is both important in different topics of two clusters. In the visualization of CiteSpaceII, important nodes is shown as ‘‘Citation tree-rings’’, which represent the citation history of an article. The color of a citation ring denotes the time of corresponding citations. The thickness of a ring is proportional to the number of citations in a given time slice (see Fig. 2, Chen 2006). One of the main purposes of detecting emerging trends is to understand the flow of information among research areas: which areas contribute knowledge and which areas are ‘‘borrowers’’ of knowledge. For this purpose, it is useful to track scientific paradigms as a function of time. Morris et al. (2003) introduced a timeline technique wherein documents are initially clustered using bibliographic coupling into research fronts, which donate groups of documents that consistently cite a fixed, time invariant group of base documents. The time-zone view in CiteSpaceII resembles the overall layout of timeline visualization of Morris et al. (2003). In terms of the major differences, time-zone views in CiteSpaceII simultaneously show cited articles and citing terms in order to highlight the mapping between a research front and its intellectual base (Chen 2006).

Descriptive statistical analysis We collected citation data compiled by the ISI Web of ScienceTM Core Collection, which provides researchers, administrators, faculty, and students with quick, powerful access to the world’s leading citation databases. Authoritative, multidisciplinary content covers over 12,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide—including open access journals—and over 160,000 conference proceedings. An initial title search for ‘‘business model*’’ and filtering out record types such as research notes resulted in 1498 records published between 1995 and 2015 (download in November 18th, 2015). After refinement in business, management and economic in order to ensure the relevancy, the 969-article dataset is used in the subsequent co-citation analysis.

Fig. 2 Citation tree-rings (Chen 2006)

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Overall growth analysis Figure 3 presents line charts of numbers of published articles and total citations between 1993 and 2013. There is a drastic increase in the numbers of articles published every year after 2000, which is almost consist with some researchers’ opinions that the business model concept became prevalent with the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s (Zott et al. 2011). As for the numbers of total citations, there is no citation of business model literature before 1996, and less than 10 citations before 1999. By 2014 this number had grown to 2235, which implies a widespread influence and attention of business model study in the recent years. The exponential growth is a typical characteristic of the emergence and development of new disciplines or research domains (Guan and Ma 2007). The model can be expressed as: C ¼ aebY where C is the cumulative number of publications or citations; Y is the publication or citation year; a and b are parameters. During the whole determined period, the exponential growths of publications and citations are clearly seen (R2Publications ¼ 0:8672, R2Citations ¼ 0:9743). According to Price (1963), this indicates that the new interdisciplinary business model is emerging with the development in business and management.

Research area analysis Figure 4 shows the distribution of research areas of business model articles; the research direction of each article is given by Web of Science. Most of the articles are interdisciplinary, which results in the sum of all proportions is greater than 100%. According to Fig. 4, the main areas of business model articles are computer science, business/economics, and engineering. More detailed directions include e-commerce, enterprise management, information management, etc. It is a reasonable result since under the circumstances of Internet revolution in business operations, a larger scale of reform and

Fig. 3 Numbers of published articles and total citations

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innovation of business model took place on e-business, making the research in the fields of computer science more abundant compared with other disciplines (Fig. 4). Table 1 is a ranking of top-10 highly published journals of business model articles in the dataset. Most of them are leading journals in the fields of management, energy and business, which reflects the major perspectives of business model researchers. Most of the journals’ impact factors are above 1. It is interesting that as practitioner-oriented journals, Harvard Business Review, have been most cited except Long Range Planning, which published a special issue to ‘‘Business Models’’ in 2010. This may demonstrated that scholars and practitioners paid close attention to industrial society related issues in the business model articles.

Influenced institutions analysis Table 2 shows the most influenced institutions of business model study and their research areas based on their publications. University of Cambridge and University of St. Gallen play leading role among all institutions, each with publications of 17 articles; followed by University of Pennsylvania, who published 16 articles. Among the ten institutions in Table 2, six institutions are European universities, three of them are from United States. The only Chinese institution is Zhejiang University. The results show that most of the influenced institutions are located in Europe and the United States. To further explain our data in Table 2, take University of Cambridge as an example: In our dataset, there are totally 17 records those addresses appeared the name of University of Cambridge. Among them, Velu (2015) studied how the degree of business model innovation affects the survival of new firms. Kastalli et al. (2013) and Kastalli and van Looy (2013) focused on business model innovation of manufacturing firms. Wu et al. (2010) proposed a secondary business-model innovation perspective in a comparative case study. Therefore, we conclude a research area of University of Cambridge as ‘‘Innovation of business model’’. The analysis of other institutions is similar with that of University of Cambridge. As can be seen in the cooperation network in Fig. 5, University of Cambridge cooperates widely with University of Twente and other institutions, in the fields of business model innovation, design and value creation (Wu et al. 2010; Kastalli and Van Looy 2013;

Fig. 4 Distributions of research areas

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Table 1 Top-10 published journals Publications

Citations

Journals

Impact factor (2014)

1

29

2007

2

18

172

Long Range Planning

2.718

Industrial Marketing Management

3

17

137

Journal of Air Transport Management

1.930 1.084

4

16

100

Research Technology Management

1.052

5

15

241

Energy Policy

3.045

6

12

460

Harvard Business Review

1.574

7

12

186

Journal of Cleaner Production

4.959

8

11

70

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

2.678

9

10

30

R & D Management

1.190

10

9

6

Universia Business Review

0.138

Long Range Planning published a special issue to ‘‘Business Models’’ in 2010 Citations in this table may differentiate from the total citations in Fig. 1, as most of the articles cited more than one papers in their references. The citations in this table are calculated separately by each journal

Table 2 Influenced institutions Institutions

Research areas (part of)

Publications

University of Cambridge

Innovation of business models

17

University of St. Gallen

Digital/Open business model

17

University of Pennsylvania

Information science and business models

16

Delft University of Tech

Information structure of business models Business models of e-government

14

Harvard University

Business model of value creation

13

University of Twente

Integration of business and information technology Business model of E-health

12

Zhejiang University

E-business models

12

University of California-Berkeley

Innovation of business models

11

Polytechnic University of Milan

Business model design

10

IESE Business School

Business model design/innovation

10

Research areas in this table are unable to cover all publications of each institution. They only represent some of the major research areas of their publications

Fritscher and Pigneur 2009). Harvard University and University of California Berkeley have been cooperated for the coordinated development of the business model innovation (Chesbrough and Schwartz 2007). According to He et al. (2009), both within-university collaboration and international collaboration are positively related to an article’s quality, which suggests that collaboration between institutions may promote the research of business model.

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Fig. 5 Cooperation network of institutions

Co-citation analysis Clusters analysis on co-cited articles The visualization of clusters of co-cited articles is shown in Fig. 6. As mentioned in ‘‘Methodology’’ section, the colors of citation rings and links are corresponding to the different time slices. Consequently, the two green clusters (Cluster #2 and #3) are the relatively old ones, and the most prominent cluster (Cluster #0) is the most recent one. Table 3 presents some basic information of four predominant clusters. Cluster #0 is the youngest cluster and Cluster #3 is the oldest one. Clusters labels are identified based on burst terms extracted from titles, abstracts, descriptors, and identifiers of bibliographic records (Chen 2006). Results indicate that the research priorities of those clusters keep changing over time. From the earlier of the time (Cluster #2 and #3), case study and knowledge network in business model are main priorities of researchers; then some researchers changed to focus on value issues (e.g. value capture and value network) of business model.

Table 3 Basic information of four predominant clusters Cluster ID

Cluster label

0

Flexible business model

Research priorities

Numbers of articles in cluster

Business model innovation

30

Business model creation 1

Business modeling

Business model design

25

Business model and firm performance Empirical analysis 2

European ERP value chain

Value capture from business model

14

Value network of business model 3

Knowledge network

Knowledge network in business model

14

Case study of business model

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More recently (Cluster #0 and #1), researchers put more emphasis on business model innovation and creation. This is a reasonable result because as economic environment becomes more and more complex, replication of business model may not ensure the success of a business. Thus a clear description of business model may not be a noteworthy priority for researchers. Instead, creation and innovation of business model is likely to get more attention from researchers (Fig. 6).

Turning points analysis on co-cited articles In the visualization of co-citation network, pivot points are highlighted with a purple ring so that they stand out in a visualized network (see ‘‘Methodology’’ section). Three remarkable pivot nodes are identified in co-cited article network, which are Zott and Amit (2008), Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) and Timmers (1998). Notably, these pivot nodes are computationally identified instead of manually scanned by users so as to ensure that all pivot points are correctly found. Teece (2010) is the landmark node, which is respectively easier to find because it has large size. In some cases some nodes (e.g. Chesbrough and Rosenbloom 2002) can be landmark and pivot at the same time, but a pivot node could also have a small size (e.g. Timmers 1998) as long as it connects two different clusters (Fig. 7). Teece (2010) is a landmark node in co-citation network. The article argued the significance of business models and explores their connections with business strategy, innovation management, and economic theory. This article provided deep understandings of the concept of business model, and has been cited by 404 in Web of Science database during the 5 years after published. The three turning points of business model study are Zott and Amit (2008), Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002), and Timmers (1998), respectively. Zott and Amit (2008) investigated a unique, manually collected dataset contains 170 enterprises, and developed a formal model in order to analyze the contingent effects of product market strategy and business model choices on firm performance. They contributed to the empirical study of large samples of business model study, and achieved useful conclusions for business model

Fig. 6 Clusters of co-cited articles

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Timmers (1998) Zott & Amit (2008)

Chesbrough & Rosenbloom (2002) Teece (2010)

Fig. 7 Landmark node and turning points

innovation, which makes it the turning point of Cluster #0 and #1. The author, Raphael Amit, is one of the most influential authors in the dataset, as measured by his total citations relative to his number of publications. Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) explored the role of the business model in capturing value from early stage technology, which is the turning point of Cluster #2 and #0. They offered an interpretation of the business model as a construct that mediates technical potential with the realization of economic value. Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) is also the most frequently cited literature among all the samples in this study, which makes it both turning point and landmark node in co-citation network. Timmers (1998) is the turning point of Cluster #2 and #3. In this article, he put forward one of the earliest definition of business model, and proposed a two-dimension classification of business models, which laid a foundation for the design and innovation of business model. Table 4 lists some of the highly cited articles in each cluster and turning points identified by CiteSpaceII.

Turning points analysis on co-cited authors A visualization of the network of co-cited authors is demonstrated in Fig. 8. There are three points which obviously stand out from other points as pivot nodes and landmark nodes: Paul Timmers, Alexander Osterwalder and Henry Chesbrough. It can be speculated that these three authors may play an important role during the development of business model study. Paul Timmers is one of the earliest researchers who proposed an explicit definition of business model. Timmers (1998) suggested that a business model for electronic markets is (1) an architecture for the product, service and information flows, including a description of the various business actors and their roles; and (2) a description of the potential benefits for the various business actors; and (3) a description of the sources of revenues. Most of subsequent researchers defined business model in the way of enumerating possible components of business model after Timmers’s definition. Afuah and Tucci (2001) presented a list of components including customer value (distinctive offering or low cost), scope (customers and products or services), price, revenue sources, connected

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Table 4 Highly cited articles in each cluster and turning points (ranked by citation frequency) Author(s)

Book/article title

Journal

Citation frequency

Cluster ID

Business models, business strategy and innovation

Long Range Planning

109

0

Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002)

The role of the business model in capturing value from innovation

Industrial and Corporate Change

91

1&2

Zott and Amit (2008)

The fit between product market strategy and business model

Strategic Management Journal

53

0&1

Timmers (1998)

Business models for electronic markets

Electronic Markets Journal

5

2&3

Landmarks Teece (2010) Turning points

Highly cited articles Zott et al. (2011)

The business model: recent developments and future research

Journal of Management

64

1

Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010)

Business Model Generation

/

56

0

Afuah and Tucci (2001)

Internet business models and strategies

/

13

2

Osterwalder et al. (2005)

Clarifying business models: origins, present, and future of the concept

Communications of the Association for Information Systems

7

3

Fig. 8 The network of co-cited authors

activities, implementation (required resources), capabilities (required skills), and sustainability. Morris et al. (2005) suggested six fundamental components of business model: Value proposition, customer, internal processes/competencies, external positioning, economic model, and personal/investor factors.

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Timmers (1998) also concluded with a qualitative mapping of the eleven business models along two dimensions: the degree of innovation and the extent of integration of functions. The result has a profound influence in that several subsequent authors suggest two dimensions in order to rate the business models: economic control (both hierarchical and self-organizing) and value integration (Tapscott 1999), power of sellers and buyers (Pigneur 1996), key classes of participants (partners, customers, suppliers) and value exchanges (Tapscott et al. 2000). Another turning point author is Alexander Osterwalder, who invented the Business Model Canvas, and lead authored ‘‘Business Model Generation’’, which sold a million copies in 30 languages. Osterwalder and Pigneur (2002) suggested that a business model canvas can be described by looking at a set of nine building blocks: key partners, key activities, key resources, value proposition, customer segments, channels, cost structure and revenue streams. Each building block contains elements instantiating the building block’s business logic. His framework of business model is currently the most widely used methodology. Beside Business Model Canvas, Osterwalder stepped into a new depth of business model study by proposing Business Model Ontology (BMO), which is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain of discourse (Osterwalder 2004). To some extent, ontology donates a relatively consummate framework of analysis. In the application of BMO, the particular presentation aims at giving a condensed and understandable overview of a specific firm’s business model on the first two levels of abstraction of the business model ontology. In the following years, scholars proposed other ontology of business model, such as the e3-value (Gordijn et al. 2005, Gordijn et al. 2006). The focus of a value model expressed using the e3-value ontology is on the value constellation: a number of actors creating, exchanging and consuming things of economic value. By taking a relatively different perspective, e3-value ontology observes which values need to be exchanged if a need occurs. As the third turning point author, Henry Chesbrough provides a diagnostic instrument of assessing current business model, and explains how to overcome common barriers to creating a more open model. Beside the turning point articles Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) discussed in ‘‘Turning points analysis on co-cited articles’’ section, Chesbrough (2010) provided insightful perspective that organizational processes must also change (and these are not presented by tools such as maps). With discovery driven planning, companies can model the uncertainties, and update their financial projections as their experiments create new data. Effectuation creates actions based on the initial results of experiments, generating new data which may point towards previously latent opportunity.

Time-zone analysis on co-cited keywords Figure 9 shows the time-zone view of co-cited keywords, which puts nodes in order from left to right according to their years of published. The left-sided nodes were published about 10 years ago, and the right-sided ones were published in recent 2 years. Some pivot nodes of keywords are listed in the red boxes. In this sub-section, we expect to depict the evolution of business model in general and the changing focus of topics in business model study. Results suggest that before 2006, the terms ‘‘Business models’’ were dominating the scene, as most authors were trying to explore issues related to defining the field. About 2 years later, the term business model was put within the contexts of ‘‘strategy’’ or

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Fig. 9 The time-zone view of co-cited keywords

‘‘capabilities’’. A reason can possibly be attributed to the close relationship and widely common aspects shared between business model and business strategy. From 2011 onward, research focused on business model creation, design and evolution, as well as empirical analysis, which consists with the results of clusters of co-cited articles. Creation and innovation of business model is still a developing area and haven’t got wide attention until 10 years ago. Researchers and practitioners have yet to develop a relatively complete framework of business model innovation and creation. Most of researchers propose some guidance or approaches to design business model. Zott and Amit (2010) provided an activity system design framework for business models. They argued that a focus on activities is a natural perspective for entrepreneurs and managers who must decide on business model design. Moreover, the activity system perspective encourages the firm in systemic and holistic thinking when designing its business model, instead of concentrating on isolated, individual choices. Nenonen (2010) introduced some design principles in their business model framework, including market and customer definition, offering design and earnings logic, operations design and management design. Zhang et al. (2015a) explored three innovative business models in energy industry: energy performance contracting, distributed energy resource and energy finance. Zhang et al. (2015b) proposed an innovative ‘‘TV ? business model’’ of a TV show in China based on the theories of stakeholders. The evolutions of the research hotspots in different countries or regions reflect different characteristics. Table 5 shows the high frequency keywords and their frequencies in the sample articles published by the institutions of America and Europe, respectively. Before 2000, business model study was still in an embryonic stage. The keywords of articles were rather disperse and have not formed hot research topics in European and American; From 2000 to 2005, electronic business and Internet business have become research focuses in both regions. At the same time, European countries started to conduct research related to the value chain; From 2005 to 2010, under the influence of European articles, researches in

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Table 5 Evolution of hot keywords between countries/regions America Hot keywords 1995–2000

2000–2005

2005–2010

2010–2015

Europe Freq.

Hot keywords

Freq.

Reuse business model

2

Business process model

4

Software components

2

Cooperative information systems

2

Customization

2

Interoperable transactions

2

Internet/electronic market

5

E-business/commerce

6

Competitive strategy

4

Value chain/network

3

Supply chain management

2

Biotechnology companies

Value creation/capture

4

Service oriented

15

Organization

4

Value chain/creation

14

Innovation

3

Mobile service

14

2

Business model innovation

17

Business model innovation

42

Social enterprise/business

10

Sustainability/sustainable business

30

Energy storage/efficiency

7

Product/product service system

24

the perspective of value chain have achieved more attention in America; Meanwhile European countries have started to pay attention to the mobile phone services business models; In recent 5 years, business model innovation became the latest hot topics of business model study. At the same time, the research emphasis of different countries also reflects its own characteristics. American articles concentrate more on business models of social enterprises and energy companies; European countries regard the sustainable development of enterprises as new research hotspots.

Conclusions and implications This study represents an initial step towards understanding the history and evolution of business model by co-citation analysis. The objective of this study is to identify landmarks that influenced the evolution of business model, as well as detect and visualize emerging trends and transient patterns in academic articles on the subject to business model. Combining the results of clusters of co-cited articles, authors and keywords, conclusion can be drawn as follows: 1.

Business model as an emerging field of business is firmly grounded in practice, and originally attracted scholars who have involved themselves in industrial society.

This is mainly demonstrated in the analysis of ‘‘Descriptive statistical analysis’’ section, and was also identified by Zott et al. (2011), Osterwalder et al. (2005) and Wirtz et al. (2016a, b). The citations in practitioner-oriented journals is generally larger than that of most academic journals (see Table 1), which reflects a closer attention to business community related issues in business model articles. Furthermore, all the turning point authors (see ‘‘Turning points analysis on co-cited authors’’ section) had participated in business practice before they published highly influenced articles. Timmers held various positions in the IT industry, and has co-founded a software company; Osterwalder founded a consultancy firm and works as a business model design consultant and manager; Chesbrough was a vice president in Plus Development Corporation. They became aware of the significance

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of business models before most of scholars due to their industrial experience. As a result, business model as a subject emerged because it is worthwhile to conceptualize, systematize and expand what is known about business success, survivals, as well as understanding their failure and lessons. 2.

Technology oriented articles and strategy oriented articles provided some of the main perspectives of business model study. As in the analysis of ‘‘Turning points analysis on co-cited articles’’ section, Timmers (1998) proposed business model definition and classification in the area of electronic markets. Moreover, in the results of ‘‘Time-zone analysis on co-cited keywords’’ section (see Fig. 9; Table 5), e-business or Internet was a common shared hot topic of European and American scholars in several years after 2000. According to Thornton and Marche (2003), in the beginning of the Internet era, Internet companies could not be valued based on their past performance since there were no precedents, which made business model an essential factor for investors to speculate about the compelling future promise. Another perspective comes from Amit and Zott (2001) and Osterwalder et al. (2005), their arguments related to transaction cost economics (TCE). Since coordination and transaction costs fell substantially, the cheap information technology, bandwidth, and communication possibilities made it much easier for companies to work in so-called value webs, which have forced some of the successful business models nowadays. Strategy oriented articles focus on explaining firms’ value creation, performance, and competitive advantage (Zott et al. 2011). According to the clustering and timeline of cocitation network, they generally appeared after technology oriented articles (see Table 3; Fig. 9), although in the last few years the authors mostly refer to the fundamental words concerning both strategy and technology perspectives (Wirtz et al. 2016a, b). A possible explanation is that both strategy and business model concern about how to do business, hence there even existed a short period that several scholars have dwelled upon understanding the difference between strategy and business models. The confusion was soon made clear by Zott and Amit (2008) who explicitly stated the differences between two concepts. Another possible explanation is that business model must be consisting with company strategies. In fact, the matching of business model and strategy is usually the success factor of many companies, such as Amazon, Uber and Airbnb. On the other hand, most empirical studies of business model come from strategy oriented articles. Most of them have drawn the conclusion that business model has significant effect on firm performance (Zott and Amit 2007; Weill et al. 2011; Morris et al. 2013). So far, a bottleneck of most empirical studies of business model is concerning with the proxy variable of business model. In current articles, the proxy variable is constructed by questionnaire scale in company survey (Zott and Amit 2008; Weill and Woerner 2015). Such approach is uneasy to popularized to those who are limited funded or have limited resource. As a result, business model in the paradigm of empirical study is remained in a small range due to inaccessible proxy variables.

3.

Business model design and innovation appear as emerging trends of business model study, as presented by several evidences in this study (Tables 3, 5; Fig. 9).

The emergence of such topics may be contributed to factors as follows: Due to the fastchanging and complicated environment nowadays, simply mimicking existing business models is not guaranteed to success in most of times (Wang et al. 2015). Thus, companies are forced to make incremental innovation and create new business models according to their specific situations. Another reason may also concerns with the theoretical grounding

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of transaction cost economics. Nowadays, low coordination and costs of novel transaction structures based on new technology make companies much easier to reconstruct the architecture of coordination between stakeholders, span organizational and industrial boundaries, and design their novel business model. 4.

A promising direction of business model study may be dynamics of business model innovation. So far, a major of concept models of business model are describing the snapshot of a company at a given time. For example, as a highly cited article identified by co-citation network (see Table 4), Business Model Canvas proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) demonstrates how the company doing business by laying out customer segments, value propositions and channels to reach customers. However, the canvas is hard to display the changing process as long as the elements were decided at the beginning. Many scholars have realized that business model should be adapted to the dynamics of environment and self-condition rather than static (Demil and Lecocq 2010; Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart 2010; van Putten and Schief 2012). What would an appropriate framework of dynamic business model be like? The question is remained and worthy to be answered.

Limitations of this study Beside the concluding remarks and implications provided in this study, this research may provide useful scaffolding to the following area of research in future: 1.

2.

This study focuses on articles which contains the keyword ‘‘business model’’ or ‘‘business models’’ in title. Topic searches and other searching terms related with business or management should be attempted in order to include samples as completing as possible. Another limitation related to the co-citation analysis. A journal article must be exposed to the academic community for a certain period of time before it is cited by other scholars and will appear in the journal databases (Backhaus et al. 2011). Thus cocitation analysis may not include the newest frontier of research.

Acknowledgements The authors are listed in alphabetical order. Han Qiao is the corresponding author and each author contributed equally to this article. This research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 71373262, 71390330, 71390331), and the Open Project of Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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