The emergence of the Internet has changed the basic business competition environment and economic rules, marking the advent of the "digital economy" era. The Internet has made a large number of new business practices possible, and a number of new enterprises based on it have emerged. Some newly emerged companies, such as Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, have achieved tremendous development and successfully gone public in just a few years. Many people have immediately become millionaires or even billionaires, creating a strong demonstration effect. Their way of making money is obviously different from traditional enterprises, so the term business model became popular, which is used to describe how these enterprises obtain profits. The emergence of these new Internet-based enterprises has also had a profound impact on many traditional enterprises. For example, Amazon has developed into the world's largest book retailer in just a few years, posing severe challenges to traditional bookstores. The new business model has shown strong vitality and competitiveness. After 1998, the US government even granted patents to some business model innovations to provide positive encouragement and protection. Whether they are preparing to start a business or those who are in existing companies, these encourage them to fundamentally rethink the way companies make money and think about their own business models during this period of economic change. Business model innovation begins to receive attention.
By around 2000, business model was a keyword initially used to describe new business phenomena in the digital economy era. At this time, its application was not limited to the Internet industry, but also extended to other industries. field. Not only business people such as entrepreneurs, technicians, lawyers and venture capitalists often use it, but non-business people such as academic researchers have also begun to study and apply it. With the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001, many Internet-based companies, although they may have good technology, went bankrupt due to the lack of a good business model. Others, although their technology may not have been the best initially, have maintained good development due to good business models. As a result, the importance of business models has been more fully realized. People realize that in an era when the wave of globalization is impacting, technological change is accelerating, and the business environment has become more uncertain, the most important factor that determines the success or failure of an enterprise is not its technology, but its business model. Around 2003, innovating and designing good business models became a new focus of the business community. Business model innovation began to attract widespread attention. Business model innovation is considered to bring strategic competitive advantages and is what enterprises should do in the new era. possess key capabilities. The rise of business model innovation has attracted unprecedented attention in the global business community. As shown in the left figure above right, a 2006 survey of 765 IBM company and department managers around the world on innovation issues showed that nearly 1/3 of them put business model innovation as the highest priority. And relative to those innovations that place more emphasis on tradition, as shown in the right panel above, product or process innovators have outperformed their competitors in operating profit growth rates over the past five years (Pohle et al., 2007).