Open Business Models and Practitioner Capabilities: A Regional Strategic Network Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical insight into the operationalisation of the practitioner capabilities that are critical to value co-creation and capture within a public-private sector open business model. The concept of business models is becoming increasingly established in industrial marketing scholarship. However, only a small number of empirical studies have focused on the concept of open business models - those business models in which value is created/co-created between practitioners outside the boundaries of a single firm - and research into the dynamic and ordinary capabilities of boundary-spanning practitioners within open business models appears absent. The empirical setting for the study is centred on three firms that form a public-private sector solutions open business model; which also forms a regional strategic network. A qualitative, single case study methodology is deployed to examine the firms as three embedded units of analysis. The data sources consist of twenty-five semi-structured interviews supplemented by archives of publications. We advance understanding of practitioner capabilities in public-private sector solutions open business models within regional strategic networks that are critical to support value creation/co-creation. As a challenge to the predominant static understanding of business models, we also make practical contributions by advancing understanding where it is currently lacking by focusing on the dynamic and ordinary capabilities of boundary-spanning practitioners in open business models, thus breaking with the rhetorical nature of much business model literature. This approach, therefore, addresses partially the under-socialisation of current business model research.