Exploring the boundaries of business model innovation and firm performance: A meta-analysis

Business Model Innovation (BMI) is an important construct in strategic management and entrepreneurship. However, the continued theoretical advancement and practical application of BMI is threatened by the lack of conceptual and empirical models that comprehensively integrate critical contingency factors and boundary conditions that characterize the BMI-firm performance relationship. Contributing to the evidence-based approach in management research, we meta-analyze 77 studies of 26,050 firms in order to highlight critically important conditions that alter the BMI-performance link. We find the effect of BMI on performance is positive (r‾c = 0.25) and that the relationship is context dependent. Specifically, we find that characteristics of BMI, as well as firm age, industry, and the stability of the macro environment shape the relationship between BMI and performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for both BMI research and practice.