Business model and inter-organizational knowledge transfer: Impact on innovation in networked enterprises

The domains of knowledge management and business models have been proven essential and promising for enhancing a firm´s performance to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This paper elaborates the conceptualization of explicitness of business model and how organizations may enhance their innovativeness through knowledge transfer processes in a network environment. This concept has theoretically been built on the definition of business models by Paul Timmers (1998). Knowledge being a rare source can be an element of strategic value for the firm which can enhance firms´ performance (Zack 2007). An enterprise with an explicitly stated business model concept can leverage internal resources and capabilities by utilizing knowledge from external sources, thus enhancing innovation and sustainability (Barney 1991; Grant 1991; Porter 1985).This paper reports an explorative qualitative research focusing on knowledge intensive industry of information technology. Being explorative in nature, the data was acquired by personal interviews. The first objective of this paper is to define the explicitness of business model in terms of knowledge transfer and innovation and the second objective is to identify the causal relationships between the explicitness of business model, the inter-organizational knowledge transfer and the collaboration.