Analogical Thinking in Business Model Innovation Ideation A descriptive study of managers' use of analogies

Sammanfattning: In increasingly competitive environments and maturing markets, companies can no longer solely rely on product or process innovations to survive. Instead, scholars are advocating Business Model Innovation (BMI), i.e. the innovation of a firm's value creation and capturing mechanisms, as a solution to outperform competition in the future. Recently, research has started to investigate the process of how organizations are in fact innovating their Business Models (BMs). Within this innovation process, ideation, i.e. the phase in which the new BM ideas are formed, stands out in importance as it directly impacts the BMI outcome. Given this significance, it is necessary to understand the governing mechanisms of the ideation phase, which are the responsible managers' cognitive processes that form the ideas. However, these have not been investigated and defined yet. Meanwhile, psychology research has identified analogical thinking, i.e. the cognitive process of drawing parallels between two situations (domains), as the main cognitive driver in ideation. Analogical thinking has been studied in other, more 'mature' areas of innovation, where it has contributed to a better understanding of the ideation phase. However, it has not been studied in the context of BMI Ideation yet. Therefore, this study aimed to describe the extent to which, and how, managers use analogies in the context of BMI Ideation. To answer the question, a simulation exercise with 31 managers was conducted, in which an existing BM was innovated in teams. The collected verbal protocols were analysed based on a conceptual framework developed from analogy literature in the ideation context. The findings show that analogical thinking is employed frequently in BMI Ideation, during which managers draw parallels between underlying relations of situations, instead of transferring mere attributes. Moreover, they access knowledge from within and between-domains, i.e. closely and less obviously related domains. Furthermore, they do so for four different purposes in the context of BMI Ideation: Generating, explaining, developing or arguing for an idea. Additionally, the findings give first indications on patterns of interaction between certain analogical combinations that occurred more frequently than expected. This study contributes to the nascent literature on BMI by shedding light on the managerial cognitive processes in the context of BMI Ideation. It thereby extends the research on analogical thinking to another critical ideation context. It further integrates other discussions in the research on BMI, and provides a framework for the study of analogical thinking in the context of BMI Ideation. Lastly, it contributes by providing a research design that can advance the concurrent studies of the BMI process, compared to the historical focus dominant in research today.