Business Model Innovation Cases from the Wood Products Industry

Globalization is further spurred by ICT in operations as well as customer relations also in the wood products industry. For meeting the increased competition, firms have to optimize internal resources to external opportunities. Increasingly, the Business Model (BM) concept has been a useful analytical tool. The BM concept offers good abstraction of activities and enables comparison between different business contexts. Emergently, studies have shifted focus from technology innovations towards innovations in BMs. However, the majority of studies in this field have treated all cases of BM innovations as a homogenous group and, as a result, paid little attention to the need for a fit between organizational and industry/contextual related factors.

To address this gap, our research presents a study of two cases of BM innovations under transformations taking place in the wood products industry. These changes are brought about by (1) the need for an interplay between “upstream” and “downstream” strategies in the industry; and (2) the increasing need for servitization and solution-based models in organizations’ offerings. This research aims to study the influencing factors, consequences, challenges and order of changes in elements of BMs, in regard to the BM innovations that took place in the two case companies.

Keywords: Business Model, Innovation, Transformation, Wood Industry, Case study