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While developing innovative business models and exploitation plans for demo solutions of the Horizon2020 EU-SysFlex project1, the authors of this paper encountered different issues. Most of these issues originated from the complexity of the ecosystems around those solutions, which made it difficult to exploit them beyond their demo stages. Problems can occur in the exploitation of diverse types of technical solutions in complex ecosystems, due to the need to consider many stakeholders and/or important local regulations. Moreover, these types of solutions are often influenced by public entities and can depend on future regulations. Therefore, it is very important to not only consider all the actors and beneficiaries involved, but also the regulators and other stakeholders whose buy-in might be needed. Moreover, the authors (Vinaixa et al., 2022) previously developed the Value Creation Ecosystem (VCE), a visual and practical tool to deal with some of these problems. However, a further level of concretion and detail was still needed. Hence, a new tool was developed to cope with these issues and to better exploit and/or replicate technical solutions. In other words, there was a need for a new tool to perform business model innovations in complex and/or highly regulated ecosystems.
Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) define business models as the ‘fundamental structures for how companies create, deliver and capture value’. More simply put, a business model defines the solution that a business aims to take to the market and how it can do so in a profitable manner. However, the definition of the term ‘business model’ and what fundamentally constitutes business model innovation remains ambiguous (Amit & Zott, 2012; Bocken et al., 2014), as the concept is considered at different levels by different researchers in the literature (Stewart & Zhao, 2000; Morris et al., 2005; Zott & Amit, 2008).
Different tools for designing innovative business models have been developed recently and applied broadly by researchers, entrepreneurs, and business managers (Keane et al., 2018). Specifically, Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas (BMC), introduced in 2010, defined business models in a structured manner whereby a model consisted of nine key elements, or ‘building blocks’. The BMC gained popularity for its simplicity in visualizing the individual characteristics and offerings of a particular business, effectively representing a business strategy in a box (Aure, 2014).
Building on this BMC, a number of new business modelling tools – or ‘canvases’ – took shape. The reasoning behind their divergence from the initially-prescribed BMC is that Osterwalder and Pigneur’s BMC focused specifically on businesses which are financially driven, and would not always be able to capture value that goes beyond generating financial revenue (Burkett, 2013; Coes, 2014; Yang & Wu, 2016). Examples of this include designing business models for social enterprises and regulated entities (Qastharin, 2016; Carter & Carter, 2020; Timeus et al., 2020). The BMC is not the most appropriate tool for these types of entities since they normally do not necessitate generating profits to reward shareholders, nor are they concerned with how to commercialize this value. Moreover, while the emphasis of any business model definition has traditionally been centred around value capturing, the introduction of value creation into the most recent definitions made the concept shift somewhat from value capturing towards value creation (Simberová & Kita, 2020; Climent & Haftor, 2021). This opened the door to use the concept with non-for-profit entities and other situations where value is created but not necessarily captured (commercialized). This is especially the case for businesses in highly regulated sectors, such as energy, infrastructure, or healthcare, which tend to require complicated business models, with different regulatory frameworks in different countries or local areas.