A systematic literature review of open business models

The concepts of customer value creation, organizational networks and open innovation have emerged in recent years, and innovative business models have brought a greater attention to these studies. Organizations have found that the product innovation or the process innovation alone is not enough for a company to stay competitive in today's changing economy. Innovation must be at the core of the organization's business model. Business model innovation transforms one business model into another. This conversion may affect an entire business model, or a combination of elements related to value proposition, value creation, value delivery, value capture, and the relationships between these factors or the value network. There are various methods and strategies to innovate in a organization's business model. None of these methods is a one-fits-for-all remedy for different types of organizations in various industries. The open business model is one of the most common methods considered as a feature that leads to success of many business model innovations among industries Open business models are defined as business models in which cooperation plays a vital role in creating and capturing value in organizations. Despite the benefits and opportunities that such business models create for organizations, they have not been considered in the studies conducted inside the country. This study aims to delve deeper into this concept, comprehensively review the progress made therein, bridge the scientific and practical gaps, and reflect important issues that shall require more attention in future studies. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the importance of the open business model as a field of research concerning the development of related academic research. The areas where the open business model has attracted more attention are also discussed. This paper is an overview of literature and addresses the question ‘what is the summary of the scientific literature on the domain of open business models?’

To achieve this goal, the search began with a combination of keywords in the Web of Science database and subsequently a bibliometric analysis was performed using the VOSviewer software. Finally, a systematic review of literature was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines. For this purpose, in the first step and based on the subject of the study, the research questions were developed in accordance with the research design. In the next step, the research protocol was designed, and an appropriate mental model was plotted accordingly. Subsequently, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were determined. The comprehensive and systematic search began within the literature, and 303 studies were selected. After the classification, screening, and measurement of their quality, 30 studies were finally examined in depth (through a detailed review of their abstracts, introductions, methodologies and results), and the required data were collected.

This study is based on the analysis of the literature related to the open business models. It explains the trend of the developments in the studies of this area and their key findings. There is also an attempt to introduce the most impressive studies, authors, journals, and citations and make a spectrum of frequent keywords in this field. The topics discussed in these articles are divided into eight main categories including Impact on Organizational Performance (7), Typologies (7), Literature Review Articles (5), Necessity of Business Model Openness (3), Open Business Model antecedents (2), Challenges of open Business Model (2), creation of a structure for open business models (2), and open business models in small and medium enterprises (2). Some of these articles cover several topics. Some of the selected articles were literature reviews of the subject (5), some conceptualized the literature related to open business models (7), and some worked to create open business models for real companies (15). The other articles focused on creating a framework for specific companies or specific industries (3) such as newspaper industry, market source software, industry-university partnership, 3M agricultural industry, SAP, Geberit, and the like.

The research results conducted in this article confirm the direct effect of using open business models and moving towards the openness of business models on value creation and the performance of companies. The purpose of this article was to emphasize the importance of the subject by conducting a systematic review using the PRISMA guidelines, the keywords on the web of science database and the VOSviewer software. The results of the study showed the increasing attention of researchers and organizational decision-makers in concepts such as co-creation and collaboration in business models. The trend shows that, over time, changing close business models, moving towards open business models and paying attention to open innovation concepts will be a bigger trend in research articles. Moreover, our finding confirmed the direct effect of moving towards the openness of business models on value creation and improving the performance of companies.