The “Fatal Flaws” and the “Trump Cards” of a Business Model: From the View of Key Disadvantages and Key Advantages

The premier precondition for a company to pursue a certain business model (BS) is to recognize its merits and demerits. By comparing with different BSs bilaterally, we can find the “fatal flaws” and the “trump cards” of a BS, which are so called key disadvantages and key advantages. To support them accordingly are the concepts of hygiene abilities and motivational abilities. The possession of hygiene abilities doesn’t necessarily bring success, but the lack of them will certainly leads to the failure of a BS. On the contrary, the lack of motivational abilities doesn’t necessarily leads to failure, but strong motivational abilities often bring success. It is necessary for a company to have both these two types of abilities, which means it can not only have the ticket to the game, but also have the trump cards at hand. The contributions of this paper lies in three aspects: (i) the clarification of the concept of key resources and key abilities, (ii) the uncover of the influence of them to BS. All these opened a window for the future research on firm strategies based on BSs.