Now here's something completely different from me: a paper on business model innovation, [newly published in the Journal of Technology Transfer](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10961-025-10303). ![[Pasted image 20260129095018.png]] Think back to the start of Covid. Every entrepreneur and manager out there was saying: "we've got to pivot and totally change our business." But how many actually did and how did they do it? ![[giphy.gif|300]] It's actually a really hard question to answer, since it's really hard to figure out what a 'pivot' is. In entrepreneurship research and practice, we think about pivots as a fundamental change to the business model, of creating value in a totally new way. But what does this actually entail? Is it changing your product? Is it shifting to sell online? What about shifting your sales calls online or going from the office to remote work? It turns out it's really, really hard say when a company does a business model innovation. For public companies you can [enslave some MBA students and for them to read 10-Ks until their eyes bleed in order to code who changes their target market](https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.187), but no one has found a good way yet to do this for smaller companies that don't have to file a lot of administrative data. Really, the only way that's out there is to send out a bunch of surveys and ask a manager really nicely if they did a business model innovation. But that's relying on a person to figure out if they did change their business model and that just gives you one point in time. And it's even harder to get people to do surveys in the middle of a pandemic when everyone is waiting in a socially distanced line to get into the grocery store. ![[IMG_2189.jpeg|300]] (A picture I took while waiting in a socially distanced line to get into the grocery store) ## The "How Did They Actually Do This?" Part How did we do it? Well, we talked to people. A lot of people, repeatedly. We interviewed 85 different high-growth entrepreneurs across the UK. And we talked about everything, from the weather to their sales processes to [how they were helping out their employees](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2022.2143905), just everything under the sun And then we ket talking to them. This is the fabled "longitudinal qualitative data" where we get to talk to the same people over time (in our case, every 6 to 10 weeks) to study how things changes. And we started to see that some of them were changing their business, and we started to see what caused that change and why. Here's what makes this research special: instead of asking entrepreneurs "did you pivot?" and taking their word for it, we created a coding system where three independent raters looked at each company's business model across nine different components (things like value proposition, customer segments, revenue model, etc.). Each component fell into one of three categories: experience (how customers get the product or service), offering (what product or service they sell) or configuration (what they do in order to make and sell the product or service). Each interview was read by 3 different raters (see that giant author list, we all pitched in). If at least two out of three raters agreed that a component changed, and if changes happened across at least two of the three major business model dimensions, boom—that counted as genuine business model innovation. We achieved 83% agreement between raters, which is actually quite impressive for qualitative research. So what does this tell us? First, there was some but not a lot of BMI. about 30% of the firms we talked to actually changed their business models in a meaningful way between March 2020 and December 2021. But more importantly, we get to see what actually changed. Every firm that innovated changed their product, but there was lots of other changes involved too. ![[Pasted image 20260129105904.png]] ## The Three Faces of Crisis Innovation After looking carefully at the stories about what changed and how, and especially when, we identified three main archetypes of busienss model innovation. ### Crisis Response (The "Oh Crap" Pivot) These firms had to change or die. Think event ticketing companies suddenly having to support virtual events, or tourism firms losing 70% of their revenue stream overnight. These were typically smaller firms with fewer resources who made rapid changes in the early pandemic period. ### Crisis Enablement (The "Opportunist") These entrepreneurs spotted new opportunities created by the crisis. A thermal imaging company pivoted from monitoring cow health to fever detection. A FinTech firm adjusted their product for the wave of new freelancers leaving traditional jobs. These firms had some breathing room but used the crisis as a springboard. ### Planned Innovation (The "Steady As She Goes") Perhaps most surprisingly, some firms engaged in business model innovation that had nothing to do with COVID. They either continued with pre-pandemic plans or used the fallow period (when customer activity slowed) to redirect resources toward new opportunities they'd previously identified. Because we have such nice data, we can figure out what triggered the BMI and the processes they used to actually carry it out. ![[Pasted image 20260129110526.png]] ## The Bottom Line This research gives us something rare: a systematic way to study business model change that doesn't rely on hindsight bias or founder mythology. The three archetypes provide a useful framework for understanding that crisis innovation isn't just about speed—it's about matching your response to your situation.