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The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for practitioners for developing creative strategies and new business models.

This paper reviews more than 150 interviews with CEOs, directors and business unit heads from across functional areas over the past decade, and captures best practices in strategy development and business modelling.

Findings of this study were combined with a review of relevant research papers from leading academic and practitioner journals to identify three critical management practices: challenging mental models, looking beyond logic and encouraging openness for new ideas, which enable organizations to develop creative strategies for building better business models.

This paper demonstrates how these three practices combined can serve as a much needed tool for creative strategy design and development, particularly for established companies, when confronted with new forms of competition.

Repeatedly engaging in strategic exercises may lead to a certain weariness, as the same strategic processes are used over and over again. The authors advocate looking at business model as a new concept to challenge existing beliefs and what is taken for granted. This paper aims to better understand how business model renews strategic processes. Does it change the strategic process, or is it a new strategic tool? Based on an analysis of the strategic processes of eight small- and medium-sized enterprises, the authors identify four mechanisms for challenging existing strategic processes: cognitive challenge, focus on process, mindset and mindset change, cognition and capabilities. Renewing strategic tools and processes is necessary to change the lens through which the environment is viewed. This change of perspective happens because of newness in the process of how top managers read the organisation and the environment, thus adapting their business more quickly than do other companies. To combine the understanding of history necessary for strategic thinking with the ability to think outside the box requires a certain flexibility of mind, which can be called cognitive strategic ambidexterity.

Based on an analysis of the strategic processes of eight small- or medium-sized enterprises, this paper shows that it is not because of business modelling that top managers may renew their strategic approach and think outside the box.

Based on an analysis of the strategic processes of eight small- and medium-sized enterprises, the authors identify four mechanisms for challenging existing strategic processes: cognitive challenge, focus on process, mindset and mindset change, cognition and capabilities. Renewing strategic tools and processes is necessary to change the lens through which the environment is viewed. This change of perspective happens because of newness in the process of how top managers read the organisation and the environment, thus adapting their business more quickly than do other companies.

A lot of research has been conducted in the fields of strategy as practice and business model. The newness added by this article is the interlinkage between the two fields of research. Looking at the process of strategy through the lens of business modelling has so far not been covered. Cognitive strategic ambidexterity is the key.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), Millennials, a major financial crisis, and legitimacy issues in a mature sector, ridden by mass imitation, have plunged many business schools into an unprecedented turmoil. Most deans are struggling to address it. In such a mature sector, differentiation is a strategic option to protect profit margins. While accreditations and rankings have reinforced imitation, the purpose of this paper is to propose authenticity as a strategic differentiation mechanism to turn this turmoil into a renaissance of purposeful, credible, and successful business schools.

The authors use an inductive, qualitative approach based on the multiple case studies analysis of six American and European business schools.

Accreditation-based reputation alone is no longer a competitive advantage. It is based on credibility and reputation. Authenticity can be used to regain credibility. The authors propose to define authenticity as the specificity of the education and the local embeddedness of a business school. Authenticity emphasizes the student experience’s idiosyncratic nature. Building on idiosyncrasy allows business schools to differentiate themselves, maintain credibility, enhance reputation, and regain market share in a mature market, ridden by imitation.

The paper is based on a limited number of cases in three developed countries. Emerging markets are not considered.

The paper opens new strategic perspectives for deans.

The paper promotes the concept of authenticity-based strategizing, used successfully in the wine industry, for business schools to cope with their turmoil and to maintain high margins as their market matures. It emphasizes the idiosyncratic dimension of education and its strategic value.

The management of reputation and status is central to creative professional service firms (CPSFs) rendering the internationalisation process a particular challenge. The authors build on arguments that internationalisation requires moving from outsidership to insidership within client networks and focus on how CPSFs build signals about quality to start this process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The exploration draws from the international business, professional services and organisational status bodies of literature. A multiple case study design was developed comprising ten Irish architecture firms. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted.

The findings clarify how relationships start in the internationalisation process through signal building about quality. This allows CPSFs to join client networks moving from outsidership to insidership. The findings systemise three different approaches for CPSFs: from outsidership to insidership within a local market network, within a global industry network and within a global project network.

Research within other sectoral and geographical contexts could support transferability of the findings.

The study has implications for international business strategies as it identifies multiple paths to relevant network insidership and the tactical responses managers can use to achieve this.

The authors believe that incorporating signal-building mechanisms into the internationalisation process is a novel approach to theorizing about how CPSFs move from outsidership to insidership. The authors offer important theoretical insights into the international business, professional service firm and organisational status literatures. CPSF business leaders should benefit as it helps them to focus on a portfolio of signal-building approaches that can start the internationalisation process.

Business model research has long focused on external triggers, drivers, and enablers of business model adoption. What is less well known is how business models are adopted in practice. Using a conceptual framework developed by Baden-Fuller and Mangematin, we propose 16 ideal types of business models. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of 77 businesses, we explore the antecedents of these business model types, paying particular attention to multi-sided models, which are growing in prominence, and require businesses to manage complexity and interdependencies. Surprisingly, our analyses reveal that tools developed to support business design, creativity, or visualization were systematically absent from the operationalization of complex, multi-sided business models. The paper contributes to our understanding in three ways: (1) it reveals how businesses with complex, multi-sided models are crafted using heuristics rather than rational business model design tools, (2) it highlights consistent relationships between the practices employed during business creation/reconfiguration and the business models that are adopted, and (3) it opens fruitful research avenues to develop tools to support heuristics in business design and implementation.

The leading frameworks of internationalization have contributed significantly to our knowledge of how firms internationalize, but do not fully explain how firms actually create and capture value from customers when internationalizing their activities. Understanding the value creation and capture activities defining their business model(s) is critical for firms moving into less familiar markets, and is particularly relevant for service firms where variability is an inherent feature of the firm/client experience. To address this gap, we take a business model perspective to analyze 144 internationalization events of 10 professional service firms. We find that the case firms adopted four different business models when internationalizing, and that single firms may utilize portfolios of business models. Our findings contribute to both the services internationalization and business model literatures by showing how variability in the internationalization process substantiates the need for business model portfolios.

Research has highlighted the cognitive nature of the business model intended as a cognitive representation describing a business’ value creation and value capture activities. Although the content of the business model has been extensively investigated from this perspective, less attention has been paid to the business model’s causal structure – that is the pattern of cause-effect relations that, in top managers’ or entrepreneurs’ understandings, link value creation and value capture activities. Building on the strategic cognition literature, this paper argues that conceptualizing and analysing business models as cognitive maps can shed light on four important properties of a business model’s causal structure: the levels of complexity, focus and clustering that characterize the causal structure and the mechanisms underlying the causal links featured in that structure. I use examples of business models drawn from the literature as illustrations to describe these four properties. Finally, I discuss the value of a cognitive mapping approach for augmenting extant theories and practices of business model design.