Steering managerial attention towards business model innovation: The role of organizational design

• Business model innovation (BMI) requires top management (TMT) attention. • Firms can purposefully use organizational design to steer TMT attention toward BMI. • Organizational design shapes the TMT’s attentional perspective and attentional engagement. • Attentional perspective and engagement affect the noticing and sensemaking of BMI opportunities. • Our process model explicates the dynamic interplay between organizational design, attention, and BMI. Research on business model innovation (BMI) often assumes that the top management team (TMT) can readily identify and act on business model opportunities. However, the question of what organizational factors affect the TMT’s ability to allocate and sustain attention toward BMI opportunities remains underexplored. Drawing on the attention-based view and using a longitudinal case study of a retail bank, we explore how organizational design influences attentional perspective (what TMTs notice) and attentional engagement (how they sustain focus in sensemaking), and how attentional perspective and engagement interact over time in shaping BMI outcomes. By offering a new process-oriented understanding of BMI as an attention-intensive transformation, we demonstrate that BMI is not just a cognitive but also a structurally embedded process. Our study calls for a more integrative approach − one that accounts for how formal organizational elements shape the managerial attention necessary for BMI.