ABSTRACT

Prior work has shown that adoption of online channels required substantial changes in underlying resources and capabilities of the firm in line with the recent notion of substantial business model innovation and of the barriers to business model innovation proposed in the literature. The implementation of an online-based business model can be seen as a substantial business model innovation. In the context of the rapid technological developments of the Internet of the early 2000s, Swedish smaller manufacturing enterprises were obviously facing external pressure from the business environment to innovate their business model towards online-based models. Having reviewed the core elements of business model, business model innovation and its deterrents, the authors proceed to developing a set of hypotheses that are contextualized in the setting of online channel adoption. The study’s conceptualization of an online-based business model follows the first-wave design of the studies of online channel adoption reported in Bengtsson et al. and Vladimir Vanyushyn.