Business model innovation or Business model imitation–That is the question

This paper explores the phenomenon of intra-industry Business Model (BM) imitation through the concept of BM configurations and sheds light on how it relates to BM innovation. The analysis focuses on similarities and deviations of BM configurations among 80 companies operating in the industry sector related to Phantom Limb Pain (PLP). Leveraging a questionnaire-based mapping tool, the results show that companies operating within the area of PLP treatment apply relatively similar BM configurations. This indicates that companies mostly imitate the successful BMs of their main competitors in the industry as a whole and in their specific sub-groups, thus potentially ignoring the opportunity to also compete on a BM level. The contribution brought by the paper is twofold. First, it adds to the research stream on BM configurations by showing that this concept can be used not only to analyze and foster cross-industry BM imitation, but also to explore and examine intra-industry BM imitation (or differentiation). Second, the article contributes to the research stream on intra-industry BM imitation by going beyond prior anecdotal evidence and empirically testing the existence of the phenomenon of intra-industry BM imitation and hence, the potential innovation space on a BM level.