In today’s competitive environment, firms face strong challenges. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment where open innovation is a strategic choice and, on top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized most of these disrupting forces. Incumbent companies must act strategically by adapting their business model to minimize the risk and to capture the new value that emerges. This article intends to contribute to the development of the nascent stream of research that seeks to understand the evolution of Business Models through time—known as Business Model Dynamics (BMD)—and explores how to better align this evolution to the implementation settings of strategy. This exploratory study is built upon a meta-synthesis approach to identify, analyze, and clarify how academics have dealt with the three terms used in the Business Model Dynamics research strand: Business Model Innovation, Business Model Adaptation, and Business Model Evolution. The results of the meta-synthesis show that a disambiguation of concepts is necessary as, from an organizational learning point of view, it is required to provide a better connection between strategic value appropriation and changes on Business Models. This article contributes to the researcher and practitioner’s literature on Business Model Dynamics offering a clear and rigorous definition of each term from a strategic point of view, thus preventing the conceptual incoherence and their reiterated wrong use as synonyms.

Surviving in a humanitarian disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a big challenge for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in all industries. Furthermore, cultural and creative firms face additional challenges. Many of those firms have survived the effects of the pandemic by proposing redesigned business models that have brought new added value in response to environmental hostility; they have strategically responded to the crises by adapting their business model. According to the extant literature, in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environments, dynamic capabilities are developed to detect and seize new opportunities and reconfigure the company’s assets. However, in very hostile environments, such as the COVID-19 crisis, the dynamic capabilities approach fails to explain the firm owners’ strategic decisions. A cross-case comparative analysis of ten micro and small firms in Spain’s cultural and creative industries has been conducted to examine how enterprises adapted to the COVID-19 crisis and the different organizational capabilities they implemented. This work proposes a new framework that postulates that business model adaptation is better understood under the emergency management theory and improvisational capability, instead of only under the dynamic capabilities lens. Organizational proximity in the diffusion of innovations under the open innovation paradigm is also critical to understanding the business model adaptation. From an academic perspective, this article enriches the current understanding of business model asdaptation by micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in very hostile environments. The new framework intends to offer managers concrete guidelines about systematically adapting their business models in hostile situations.

Purpose: Firm innovative performance in emerging markets must take into account the peculiarities of their competitive environment. Research on the effect of innovation on firm performance focuses mainly on high-tech firms in developed countries. This study proposes a model that empirically examines how technological and non-technological innovation influence Peruvian manufacturing firms' performance.Design/methodology/approach: Using the resource-based view, a model is proposed that allows the mediation effects of technological innovation and non-technological innovation on firm performance among low and medium-low technological intensity manufacturing firms to be analyzed. The study uses structural equation modeling and mediation analysis with data from 503 Peruvian firms researched in the 2012 National Survey of Innovation.Findings: The model's validation shows that the integrated perspective is relevant for emerging markets like Peru. Moreover, the results confirm that technological and non-technological innovation and their interrelationship are important for understanding the performance dimensions of Peruvian manufacturing firms.Originality/value: This paper contributes to the literature on innovation in Latin American economies, proposing and validating a model that combines the mediation effects of technological and non-technological innovation to explain the relevant dimensions of firm performance in emerging markets.

Global challenges demand more competitiveness from cities, calling for quick adaptation to changes brought about by the current knowledge economy. Innovation Districts (ID) stand out as the most favourable ecosystems to create economic, urban, social and governance solutions proactively and at the speed demanded by this rapid renewal of knowledge. Effective assessment is important in these areas to ensure efforts are guided to achieve the objectives set. Following validation by a panel of 17 experts through an international Fuzzy Delphi survey, and 15 experts in the DEMATEL multi-criteria decision-making approach, this study builds a conceptual framework in four dimensions (Urban, Economic, Social and Governance), with a set of 37 indicators identified as relevant to assess performance in ID and the power of influences among them. The resulting multidimensional innovation assessment framework is a powerful tool, being useful in determining the key impact indicators of existing innovation districts.