Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Business Model Literature: A Network-Based Cluster Analysis

The aim of this study is to analyze the bibliographic network of business model literature, identifying research streams and clusters while describing their content in details. To achieve this, an extensive literature review is conducted. We extract scholarly work from the OpenAlex scientific database encompassing publications up to the end of the year 2023. A search for the term “Business Model” in the titles of scholarly works found 30,590 publications. For each document, the total strength of its bibliographic coupling links with other documents, and thus the similarity between their reference lists, is calculated. The inner circle of this network, consisting of the 928 publications with the highest coupling strengths, is selected for further analysis. Within this bibliographic network core, a cluster analysis is performed. The result shows the existence of six clusters: “Business Model Innovation”, “Environmental Sustainability”, “Strategic Foundations, Theoretical Perspectives and Value Creation Potential”, “Digital Transformation, Service and Platform Innovation”, “Energy Efficiency”, and “Social Impact”. To highlight the clusters’ content, the titles of all publications in each cluster, their abstracts and keywords within each cluster are analyzed and translated into a cluster-specific narrative. This study holds both theoretical and practical implementation. The results, derived through accepted scientific methods, offers valuable insights for stakeholders to make informed decisions.