Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach

Book excerpt: Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach by Allan Afuah represents a new kind of book. Business models are about making money and most firms are in business to make money (a profit). It is therefore no surprise that the phrase "business model" is increasingly finding its way into CEO speech after speech and in business school functional areas from accounting to finance to marketing to strategy. Because strategic management is inherently integrative in nature and increasingly more focused on firm performance, strategy textbooks have come closest to addressing the subject of business models, but only implicitly and partially so. Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach draws on the latest research in strategic management to explicitly and fully explore business models. It draws on the latest research on to explore which activities a firm performs, how it performs them, and when it performs them to make a profit. It offers an integrated framework for understanding the relationship between the set of activities that a firm chooses to perform, its revenue model, its cost structure, its resources and capabilities, the competitive forces in the firm's industry, and its ability to sustain a competitive advantage even in the face of change. It provides the link between resources, product-market positions and profits―how resources and product-market positions are translated into profits. (Existing strategy texts demonstrate correlation between resources or product-market positions and profits, not their translation into profits). Additionally, it explores the relationship between business models and corporate social responsibility as well as the international component to business models. It offers a definition of business models that is deeply rooted in the resource-based and product-market theories of strategy.