Tourism and business model innovation: The case of US wine makers

This chapter focuses on innovation in business models. Specifically, we examine how entrepreneurs in the well-established wine industry develop new, innovative business models, many of which incorporate tourism. The majority of research on business models has focused on high technology. Work is needed that explores business models in other industries, such as those with a tourism component. Business model research has been criticized for lacking a coherent theoretical basis (George & Bock, 2011). In order to overcome this challenge, we build on evolutionary theory and the concepts of organizational routines and configurations to construct a framework for examining innovation in business models. Several definitions of the business model concept have been proposed and a consensus has not been achieved (cf. George & Bock, 2011). These authors provide the broad definition: ëthe design of organizational structures to enact a commercial opportunityí (p. 99), which we utilize in our research. Building on evolutionary theory, we posit that these organizational structures that make up the business model consist of clusters of organizational routines used by firms. Individual flowers in a field can mutate, displaying variations that give them different features from the other flowers. If this mutation has a competitive advantage over the other flowers, the mutation will gradually spread throughout the population of flowers (if not, the mutated flower will die and generate no offspring). Similarly, firms can exhibit variation in their clusters of organizational routines that can potentially spread throughout the industry.