Good fences make good neighbors? Directions and safeguards in alliances on business model innovation

Business model innovation receives great attention from managers. Alliances can stimulate firm's value creation of BMI but set challenges for its value appropriation. The current study's analysis by fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 580 alliances highlights architectural BMI for highly successful configurations of value appropriation. Configurations differ primarily according the firms’ supply chain role, its choice of partners, its safeguards of equity participation, and the direction of the alliance. The findings reveal two successful configurations in which the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) use equity participation and one successful configuration where suppliers do not use equity participation to safeguard own claims in horizontal alliances.