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We investigate how Salesforce’s key people used analogies and metaphors during the deployment of their (then) radical business model innovation. Our analysis shows how Salesforce’s entrepreneurial team skillfully used a mix of analogies and metaphors to communicate its innovations and differentiate the company from its competitors. We also show how business model innovators can weave together analogies and metaphors to create distinct meta-narratives that elicited strong emotions and helped construct a memorable organizational identity that galvanized stakeholders around the firm’s ecosystem appeal. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for business model and cognition research.

Despite increasing interest in business model innovation (BMI), there is only limited scholarship that examines how business model (BM) innovators present and explain their innovations to various stakeholders. As BMI often involves the creation of a new ecosystem, understanding how innovators can gain support of future ecosystem members is important. Based on a longitudinal case study of Salesforce, a pioneer in cloud computing, the authors show how the innovator’s skillful framing to different audiences fosters the emergence of an ecosystem around the new BM. The authors suggest that effective framing constitutes an important strategic process that enables BM innovators to shape new ecosystems due to the performative power of words.