Digital technology‐based business model design and innovation to address grand challenges: A process model

Abstract Research Summary The question of how a new venture designs and innovates on its business model (BM) to leverage digital technology to address multiple grand challenges has received little attention in the literature. We address this through a longitudinal case study of a new social enterprise in China. We develop an accessing‐embedding‐strengthening‐expanding process model of BM design and innovation by which a venture may increase both the scale and scope of its impact as a complementor in ecosystems addressing grand challenges. We identify the specific actions and contingencies underlying this process. Our findings contribute to the understanding of BM design and innovation based on digital technologies and propose that assessment of a BM's impact on grand challenges may be in terms of scope as well as scale. Managerial Summary How may founders build a BM that exploits a technology's potential to address diverse sustainability challenges? Our study derives insights from one for‐profit Chinese venture whose founders had the explicit objective of leveraging remote sensing data and analytics to address important and diverse social and environmental challenges. We identify the steps in its ecosystem‐based strategy (accessing, embedding, strengthening, and expanding) by which the founders targeted and entered successive application ecosystems as a complementor. This strategy has enabled them to achieve financial goals and also increase their contribution to sustainability objectives in terms of both scale (vis‐à‐vis one grand challenge) and scope (across multiple grand challenges). We also identify the specific questions that the founders had to answer in the process of executing this strategy.