Business model innovation themes of emerging market enterprises: Evidence in China

Business model innovation (BMI) is an important carrier for the rapid growth of emerging market enterprises. Yet, the role of the institutional context in BMI themes has seemingly received little attention in the literature. This study aims to conceptualise the BMI themes by integrating the business model theory with institutional attributes of BMI. Drawing on the literature, we propose two BMI themes – pioneering and perfecting, where pioneering BMI creates new market rules and perfecting BMI improves existing transaction rules. Following three sequential studies, we developed and empirically validated the scales of the two themes using two separate primary datasets collected in China. The results suggest that both transactional innovation and legitimacy building are critical to BMI in the emerging market. We contribute to the BMI theory by incorporating institutional attributes to the BMI themes, which allows a better understanding of the BMI activities of emerging market enterprises.