Business model pretotyping: exploring pre-commercialisation opportunities in practice

Most practitioners working with innovation agree that business modelling is imperative for their organisations’ survival. Nonetheless, the same practitioners still spend the majority of the time devoted for innovation on their product/process, and only limited time – if any – on exploring new or complementing business models. This myopic ‘product/process’ focus is no longer enough for organisations to create new radical breakthroughs in the market(s). Thus, to assist practitioners in changing this behaviour, our paper prescribes a directly implementable method named the vertical innovation process (VIP) framework. The VIP framework can be used to create different alternatives and variations of business models (pretotypes) when practitioners find themselves between the discovery of a breakthrough and the commercialisation of it.