Grounding Business Models: Cognition, Boundary Objects, and Business Model Change

Business model research has largely focused on business models as real entities, as cognitive and linguistic schema, and as formal representations. Although such research has made important contributions to the management literature, it has largely ignored the interrelationship between business models as schema and business models as formal representations in explaining business model change. We build on grounded cognition theories and the notion of boundary objects to offer a grounded cognition framework of businessmodel change. By developing this framework, we (a) advance understanding of the micro-foundations of strategy by explaining how business model schemas can drive boundary object-based interactions that reveal the extent of business model coherence and affect the decision to change a business model; (b) offer a new pathway by which stakeholders inform value creation and value capture by providing new insights into how physical instantiations of business models and schema work together (via grounded cognition) to increase business model coherence; and (c) explain nuances in the relationship between boundary objects, business model coherence, and the decision to change a business model, and illustrate how the mechanisms that help create a viable new business model can also help overcome an actor's psychological obstruction tomaking a pivot.