Is New Always Better? How Business Model Innovation Affects Consumers’ Adoption Behavior

Business model innovation (BMI) has recently been praised as a source of competitive advantage and a driver of company performance. However, empirical evidence on performance effects of BMI on marketing metrics is still scarce. This article applies a large-scale consumer experiment (
n
= 896) to empirically investigate whether and how innovating different BM elements affects consumers' adoption intention of innovated BMs. The results show that effects of BMI on consumers’ adoption intentions vary significantly, being strongest for innovations in the value offering architecture. Moreover, the strength of the effect on adoption intention also increased with the perceived degree of innovativeness for some of the business model elements. Yet, the surplus of simultaneously innovating several BM elements is kept in limits, as a diminishing marginal utility is found for each additionally innovated element.