Long Range Planning 43 (2010) 216e226 http://www.elsevier.

com/locate/lrp

Business Model Design: An

Activity System Perspective
Christoph Zott and Raphael Amit

Building on existing literature, we conceptualize a firm’s business model as a system of

interdependent activities that transcends the focal firm and spans its boundaries. The
activity system enables the firm, in concert with its partners, to create value and also to
appropriate a share of that value. Anchored on theoretical and empirical research, we
suggest two sets of parameters that activity systems designers need to consider: design
elements - content, structure and governance - that describe the architecture of an activity
system; and design themes - novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency - that
describe the sources of the activity system’s value creation.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

business model design is a key decision for a new firm entrepreneur ..

and a crucial - perhaps more difficult - task for managers charged with
rethinking an old model to make their firm fit for the future.

Introduction
Consider the case of FriCSo, a young engineering company that has achieved a significant techno-
logical breakthrough in friction reduction technology.1 Friction is the arch enemy of mechanical
systems - it reduces the power of machines, leads to overheating, and causes wear, breakdown
and seizure in moving parts. Suppose FriCSo’s technological invention can reduce friction by
over 15,000%: surely such a staggering technology - with clear and wide applicability to products
and industrial applications that involve moving parts (such as machine manufacturing, automobile,
shipbuilding, etc.) - will be a sure bet for commercial success? Or will it?
Once a target industry (say, automobile) has been chosen, what kind of company should be built
to commercialize the intellectual property? What ‘model’ or ‘template’ should a firm adopt in order
to embed itself into the existing ecology of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and the
myriad tier one, two and three industry suppliers? Should it choose to become a machine

0024-6301/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2009.07.004
manufacturer, building machines that embed the new technology, and selling them to the OEMs? Or
would it be better to build and operate a factory (a ‘job-shop’) that would perform the surface treat-
ment of moving parts for clients who would outsource that step in their commercial production line
to the focal firm’s factory? Or would it be better to opt for a pure R&D firm model, and simply sell
the technology (e.g., via licensing agreements) to third parties such as machine manufacturers?
Each of these choices involves a fundamentally different business model, that is, implies a differ-
ent set of activities, as well as the resources and capabilities to perform them - either within the
firm, or beyond it through cooperation with partners, suppliers or customers. And each choice
will have implications for the venture’s performance potential - it will affect what capital expendi-
tures are necessary, what prices can be charged and what margins earned, and, perhaps most im-
portantly, which customers and competitors the new firm will deal with. In other words, the design
of the business model is a key decision for an entrepreneur who creates a new firm e and a crucial -
perhaps more difficult e task for general managers who are charged with rethinking their old model
to make their firm fit for the future. Once the template is set, the activities are in place, and the
resources have been developed and honed, that template will be difficult to change, due to forces
of inertia and resistance to change.
Given the vital importance of the business model for entrepreneurs and general managers, it is
surprising that academic research (with a few exceptions) has so far devoted little attention to this
topic. We need a conceptual toolkit that enables entrepreneurial managers to design their future
business model, as well as to help managers analyze and improve their current designs to make
them fit for the future. This article draws attention to the system of activities performed by the focal
firm as well as by third parties (partners, suppliers, customers) as part of the focal firm’s business
model. We believe that improved knowledge about how to describe the architecture of the activity
system, e.g., its key design parameters, will bring the importance of the topic to the forefront of
managers’ and researchers’ thinking, and help them design better business models. In particular,
we suggest concepts that are intended to:
 give managers and researchers a ‘language,’ concrete tools and a tight framework for business
model design that can foster dialogue and promote common understanding;
 highlight business model design as a key task of the entrepreneurial manager;
 emphasize the importance of system-level design, as opposed to partial optimization (for
example, whether a particular activity should be outsourced or conducted in house).

We start by describing the firm’s activity system and explain how it captures the essence of its
business model, and then support this idea with a brief review of the recent literature on business
models. We draw on our own recent work on business models to suggest two sets of parameters
that activity systems designers need to consider: design elements (content, structure and governance)
that describe an activity system’s architecture, and design themes (novelty, lock-in, complementar-
ities and efficiency) that describe the sources of its value creation.2

Activity system: key to understanding the firm’s business model

Our previous work notes that the overall objective of a focal firm’s business model is to exploit
a business opportunity by creating value for the parties involved, i.e., to fulfill customers’ needs
and create customer surplus while generating a profit for the focal firm and its partners. That ob-
jective is reflected in the customer value proposition, and has been characterized by Magretta as ‘the
value creating insight on which the firm turns’.3 An activity in a focal firm’s business model can be
viewed as the engagement of human, physical and/or capital resources of any party to the business
model (the focal firm, end customers, vendors, etc.) to serve a specific purpose toward the fulfill-
ment of the overall objective. An activity system is thus a set of interdependent organizational ac-
tivities centered on a focal firm, including those conducted by the focal firm, its partners, vendors
or customers, etc.. The firm’s activity system may transcend the focal firm and span its boundaries,

Long Range Planning, vol 43 2010 217

but will remain firm-centric to enable the focal firm not only to create value with its partners, but
also to appropriate a share of the value created itself.

[the] purposeful weaving together of interdependent activities .

performed by the firm itself or by its suppliers, partners and/or
customers - is the essence of the business model design.

Interdependencies among activities are central to the concept of an activity system, and provide
insights into the processes that enable the evolution of a focal firm’s activity system over time as its
competitive environment changes.4 These interdependencies are created by entrepreneurs or man-
agers who shape and design both the organizational activities and the links (transactions) that
weave activities together into a system. Such purposeful design - within and across firm boundaries -
is the essence of the business model.5 Some activities relevant to the focal firm’s business model
will be performed by the firm itself, others by suppliers, partners and/or customers. The architec-
ture of the firm’s activity system - shaped by the choice of activities, how they are linked, and who
performs them - captures how the focal firm is embedded in its ‘ecology,’ i.e., in its multiple net-
works of suppliers, partners and customers, as well as defining who are the firm’s potential sup-
pliers, partners and customers (and competitors) in the first place. Thus, if FriCSo (the
technology-based startup noted above) were to adopt the business model of a machine manufac-
turer in order to exploit its unique friction-reduction technology, it would choose OEM suppliers
as its customers, and other machine manufacturers would be its competitors. However, if it adopted
a technology-licensing model, it would choose both machine manufacturers and OEM suppliers as
its customers. These important consequences of the firm’s business model design choice have ob-
vious ramifications for its ability to create and capture value. The stronger the competition implied
by the choice of the business model, for instance, the more difficult value appropriation will be.
The firm’s revenue model also plays an important role in value appropriation. Our previous
work has highlighted how the revenue model - akin to a pricing strategy for specific products or
services - refers to the specific modes in which a business model enables revenue generation. In
that sense, a revenue model complements a business model design, just as a pricing strategy com-
plements a product design. Although the concepts may be quite closely related and sometimes even
intertwined (as with, for example, Gillette’s pricing strategy of selling cheap razors to make cus-
tomers buy its rather expensive blades), business models and revenue models are conceptually
distinct.
A business model is geared toward total value creation for all parties involved. It lays the founda-
tions for the focal firm’s value capture by co-defining (along with the firm’s products and services) the
overall ‘size of the value pie,’ or the total value created in transactions, which can be considered the
upper limit of the firm’s value capture potential. Again we have noted in previous work that the busi-
ness model also co-determines the focal firm’s bargaining power: the greater the total value created,
and the greater the focal firm’s bargaining power, the greater the amount of value that the focal firm
can appropriate. How much of the total value the firm actually captures, however, depends on its pric-
ing strategy, or revenue model. For example, Loch et al. have noted how the FriCSo executives con-
templated a business model based on licensing, in which they would sell the rights to use their
technology (a combination of proprietary polymer tools with a software-supported process) to ma-
chine manufacturers and suppliers in the automobile industry. But even though they understood how
the necessary activity system would have to be designed, they struggled to find an appropriate revenue
model (to be embodied in their pricing strategy) that would be both acceptable to their automotive
clients, and allow them to maximize their profits. While their business model had taken shape, the
venture’s revenue model - how to charge for each element of the technology - was still uncertain.

218 Business Model Design: An Activity System Perspective

A business model is geared toward total value creation for all parties
.. the greater the total, the greater the focal firm’s bargaining power,
and the greater the amount of value it can appropriate.

When delineating their firms’ activity systems, managers need to bear in mind that identifying
technologically and/or strategically distinct activities can be conceptually challenging because (as
Porter points out) the number of potential activities is often quite large. Santos notes how many
seemingly inseparable activities can be broken down further, especially given ongoing advances in
information and communications technologies. One way to deal with this issue is to define activities
at different levels of aggregation. Davenport, for example, mentions the supply chain operations ref-
erence model, which lays out top-level activities (plan, source, make, deliver, and return), and also
specifies sub-activities that can be delineated at second, third and fourth levels, while Stigler notes
that, at high levels of aggregation, activities could comprise whole business functions, such as
accounting, or human resource management. At low levels of aggregation (i.e., high levels of decom-
position), activities could be as specific as the processing of customer e-mails based on their content,
or the translation of product manuals into a foreign language. In this paper, for simplicity and con-
ceptual clarity, we accept the level of aggregation at which an activity is described as a given.6

Brief review of the recent literature on business models

The emerging literature on business models suggests that a focus on activities can indeed be useful
and unifying.7 In our own work, we have defined the business model as depicting ‘the content, struc-
ture, and governance of transactions designed so as to create value through the exploitation of business
opportunities’.8 Of course, transactions link activities, and transactions and activities can be viewed
as two sides of the same coin.9 For an analogy, consider graph theory with its dual perspectives on
nodes and arcs. A graph can be described either by focusing on its nodes and by listing all the other
nodes to which they are linked, or by focusing on the arcs and describing which nodes pertain to
each arc: both are equivalent in that they yield a complete description of the graph.
Similarly, a business model can either be conceptualized as set of transactions or as an activity
system e in Afuah and Tucci’s words, a ‘system that is made up of components, linkages between
the components, and dynamics.’ Viewed as an activity system, the business model encompasses
what Afuah notes elsewhere as ‘the set of which activities a firm performs, how it performs them,
and when it performs them.’ Johnson et al. catalog key activities that might include ‘training, devel-
opment, manufacturing, budgeting, planning, sales and service,’ while Mitchell and Coles emphasize
that the business model addresses the ‘how’ of providing customers and end-users with products
and services, and Eisenmann suggests it refers to the nature of the services that firms provide to
customers, and the activities that they perform to deliver those services. Chesborough and Rose-
nbloom consider the business model as a construct that mediates between technological inputs
and economic outputs. Accordingly, the business model defines the structure of the value chain
(an activity-based concept), creating value (as Chesborough notes elsewhere) ‘by defining the set
of activities from raw materials through to the final consumer.with value being added throughout
the various activities,’ thereby addressing the underlying logic of how the firm delivers value to
its customers at an appropriate cost. In a nutshell, the received literature on business models,
explicitly or implicitly, supports an activity system perspective.10
Some scholars have pointed explicitly to the boundary-spanning nature of business models by
emphasizing the need to consider activities performed for the focal firm but outside its boundaries
by partners, suppliers or customers. This allows the focal firm to rely on the resources and capa-
bilities of third parties, and harness external ideas and technologies through ‘open business models’.

Long Range Planning, vol 43 2010 219

Indeed, in some instances entire key activities - such as product development - are shifted outside
the firm; but they remain, nevertheless, a central part of the firm’s business model.11

The design parameters of activity systems

This section describes two sets of design parameters that capture the purposeful, firm-centric design
of activity systems e design elements and design themes.

Design elements: content, structure and governance

One set of important design parameters that characterize an activity system are the design elements
of content, structure and governance, which go beyond interdependencies among activities or no-
tions of network structure.
 Activity system content refers to the selection of activities, i.e., those that are performed. For ex-
ample, in addition to the typical activities of a retail bank, Bancolombia adopted activities de-
signed to offer microcredit to the more than 60% of Colombians who did not have access to
banking services. To perform these new activities, the bank needed to train its top management,
hire and train new staff, develop new capabilities, and link the new activity to its existing system
(platforms, applications, and channels)12;
 Activity system structure describes how the activities are linked (e.g., the sequencing between
them), and it also captures their importance for the business model, for example, in terms of
their core, supporting or peripheral nature. Consider IBM: triggered by a severe financial crisis
in the early 1990s, the firm switched its core and peripheral activities, shifting its focus from be-
ing a hardware supplier (old core) to becoming a service provider (new core). Building on a body
of know-how built over decades, IBM launched a range of new activities in consulting, IT main-
tenance, and other services: by 2006, more than half of IBM’s $90bn revenues came from these
activities, which had barely existed 15 years earlier.13
 Activity system governance refers to who performs the activities. Franchising, for example, repre-
sents one possible approach to activity system governance. It can be the key to unlocking value,
as was the case when Japanese retailing entrepreneur Toshifumi Suzuki realized in the early 1970s
that the franchise system developed in the U.S. was an ideal response to the strict government
regulations which limited the size and restricting the opening times of Japanese retail outlets.
In franchising Seven-Eleven stores in Japan, Suzuki adopted a novel type of activity system gov-
ernance and managed to create value through professional management and local adaptation.14

Managers often need to make decisions on all these parameters, often simultaneously. For exam-
ple, consider P2P lending companies like Lending Club, Prosper or Zopa, which aim at enabling
direct small, unsecured loans between individuals. Important business model design issues for these
firms founders in their early stages were: (1) whether to include a secondary market for trading
loans in their activity systems or not (a content issue); (2) how precisely to link borrowing and
lending activities - for example, would they provide an algorithm to automatically match borrowers
to lenders, and if so, to whom and to how many (a structure issue)?; and (3) who should perform
the credit risk assessment of the borrower, the P2P firm or the lender (a governance issue)?

the design parameters of activity systems can be seen as independent

and orthogonal, but they can also be highly interdependent.

For simplicity and conceptual clarity, we have described the design parameters of activity systems
as independent and orthogonal, but they could also be highly interdependent. The founders of the
US P2P lending company Prosper, for example, made the conscious early decision to let lenders

220 Business Model Design: An Activity System Perspective

choose which borrowers they wanted to lend their money to. This was a structural choice (settling
the question of how lending and borrowing activities were linked) but at the same time constituted
a decision about governance (in that evaluation and selection activities were shifted to the cus-
tomers, and not performed by the firm).
Thus, activity system design describes how firms do business, and captures the essence of the busi-
ness model. Questions about business model design can thus be framed as questions about activity
systems.

NICE design themes: novelty, lock-in, complementarities, efficiency

An activity system can also be characterized through what we call design themes, which detail the
system’s dominant value creation drivers. Design themes are configurations of design elements,
or the degree to which they are orchestrated and connected by distinct themes. Conceptual and em-
pirical research has established that the common design themes that we can say orchestrate and
connect the elements of an activity system include: Novelty, lock-In, Complementarities and Effi-
ciency (summarized by the acronym NICE).
 Novelty: The essence of novelty-centered activity system design is the adoption of new activ-
ities (content), and/or new ways of linking the activities (structure), and/or new ways of gov-
erning the activities (governance). A prominent example is Apple, which used to be focused
on the production of innovative hardware such as personal computers. Through the develop-
ment of the iPod and the associated music download business iTunes, Apple was the first elec-
tronics company that included music distribution as an activity (content novelty), linking it to
the development of the iPod hardware and software (structure novelty), and digitizing it and
thereby pushing many subactivities of legal music downloads to its customers (governance
novelty). That is, Apple expanded the locus of its innovation from the product to its business
model.
 Lock-in: Activity systems can also be designed for lock-in, their power to keep third parties at-
tracted as business model participants. Lock-in can be manifested as switching costs, or as net-
work externalities that derive from the structure, content and/or governance of the activity
system. For example, in eBay’s activity system, most of the marketing and sales activities
(such as photographing and describing items for sale) are performed by the customers (sellers).
What keeps them attracted to eBay and motivates them to perform these activities and prevents
them from switching to other service providers? Arguably, one very important factor is the
strong positive network externalities inherent to the eBay activity system. With a massive
base of potential buyers, sellers know that they are more likely to perform a trade at a conve-
nient price on eBay than elsewhere e so they keep coming back: they are locked in. The same
applies to social networking sites such as Facebook - besides enjoying friendship-based network-
ing externalities, Facebook members typically invest considerable time and effort in personaliz-
ing their web pages, and these investments form strong impediments to switching to other
providers.
 Complementarities: Complementarities are present whenever bundling activities within a system pro-
vides more value than running activities separately.15 For example, in commercial banking, deposit
activity is an important source of funding that complements the banks’ lending activity - banks with-
out access to such funds suffered severely in the recent liquidity crises. In the pharmaceutical indus-
try, R&D conducted by innovative biotechnology firms can provide the drug pipeline for the
marketing and distribution activities of large pharmaceutical companies who partner with the bio-
technology firms. Similarly, in the diamond business, organizing polishing and distribution within
a single business model is advantageous because it enables the focal firm to tailor stones to the de-
mand in each market segment.
 Efficiency: Efficiency-centered design refers to how firms use their activity system design to aim at
achieving greater efficiency through reducing transaction costs. For example, a focal firm may
decide to integrate vertically to avoid being ‘taken hostage’ by its trading partners, who may

Long Range Planning, vol 43 2010 221

 have an incentive to exploit a co-dependency situation. Or consider the reverse case, in which
a firm manages to standardize the interfaces between the activities in its system, and so can lower
its transaction costs by outsourcing some activities to third parties, a design theme behind the
rise of the business process outsourcing industry in India, where companies like TCS, Wipro,
Infosys, Satyam or WNS have more than 20,000 employees each and revenues of over $1bn. An-
other example is First Data Corporation, a U.S. firm that employs 30,000 people handling crucial
activities for 1,400 card issuers, including dealing with applications, authorizing credit lines and
processing transactions for 420 million credit card accounts.16 These are examples of efficiency-
centered designs where the governance of the activity system is implied. Firms can also aim at
achieving efficiency through their activity system content and structure. Some low cost airlines
drop activities considered standard by regular airlines entirely, like on-board catering or seat as-
signment, as well as changing the way activities are performed and linked to each other (e.g., by
having customers book tickets directly online).

Each of these four sets of examples shows how firms’ business model design has been shaped
according to an overriding design theme, in many cases resulting in models that are significantly
different from their original designs, and that have created new value. Together they amount to
an activity system design framework, as summarized in Table 1.

Discussion and conclusion

Benefits of an activity system perspective on business models
In this article, we argue that the activity system perspective on business models is consistent with
the various approaches that have been advanced in the literature. A business model can be viewed as
a template of how a firm conducts business, how it delivers value to stakeholders (e.g., the focal
firms, customers, partners, etc.), and how it links factor and product markets. The activity systems
perspective addresses all these vital issues, and gives managers and academics a language and a con-
ceptual toolbox to address them and engage in insightful dialogue and creative design.
To return to FriCSo, who had developed a world-class technology for friction reduction, and
then had to decide on its future business model. As Loch et al report, the founders and their venture
capital investors jointly decided to reject the choice of a machine manufacturing business model, as
it would have been too capital-intensive and would have pitted the small start-up against powerful
and entrenched competitors with similar activity systems and resource advantages that it would

Table 1. An activity system design framework

Framework provides insight by:

Giving Business Model Design a language, concepts, and tools
Highlighting Business Model Design as a key managerial/entrepreneurial task
Emphasising system-level design over partial optimisation
Design Elements
Content What activities should be performed?
Structure How should they be linked and sequenced?
Governance Who should perform them, and Where?
Design Themes
Novelty Adopt innovative content, structure or governance
Lock-In Build in elements to retain business model stakeholders, e.g., customers
Complementarities Bundle activities to generate more value
Efficiency Reorganise activities to reduce transaction costs

222 Business Model Design: An Activity System Perspective

have found hard to beat. Instead, FriCSo adopted the business model of a machine tool manufac-
turer, positioning itself as a supplier to the powerful players, focusing on selling them products that
had great value added through their intellectual property. (Another advantage was that automotive
industry suppliers were used to buying tools, so this business model was familiar to them.) In fact,
the choice of the business model was vitally important in this case: it did not simply determine fu-
ture profit potential - rather, it was the key to the young firm’s survival. If the founders had opted
for a machine manufacturing model, they would probably not have received the equity capital they
needed from their VC investors e lacking funds to finance ongoing research and development
efforts, the firm could well have gone out of business.
Why is the activity systems perspective advantageous for managers and academics concerned
with past, current and future business models? First, a focus on activities is a natural perspective
for entrepreneurs and managers who must decide on business model design. Should activities
X and Y, which are central to the business model, be governed within or outside their firm’s bound-
aries? How should X and Y best be organized, given the firm’s (and its potential partners’)
pre-existing strengths and weaknesses, core competencies and disabilities?17 The importance of ac-
tivities-based thinking is also evident from the extensive managerial literature on outsourcing.18

an activity system perspective encourages systemic, holistic thinking in

business model design, instead of concentrating on isolated choices.

Second, the activity system perspective encourages the firm in systemic and holistic thinking
when designing its business model, instead of concentrating on isolated, individual choices (such
as ‘make or buy’ decisions about particular products, or outsourcing a particular activity). The mes-
sage to managers is clear: look at the forest, not the trees - and get the overall design right, rather
than concentrating on optimizing details. The fast-growing Spanish fashion retailer Inditex, which
manages global brands such as Zara, has clearly understood and internalized this message and made
business model thinking a corporate priority. Their Annual Report begins by explaining the Inditex
business model and highlighting its innovative elements.19 The company has made many activity
system choices that, viewed in isolation, might seem inefficient. For example, they perform many
generic activities in-house, such as dyeing and cutting fabric, and washing, ironing and ticketing
finished garments. They have also chosen to outsource sewing to small workshops located close
to their Spanish production facilities. Both of these choices might seem questionable: but, taken
as a whole, Inditex’s carefully designed activity system allows it to bring new garments from the
design stage to the shop floor in record time - days as opposed to months - which makes a big dif-
ference in the fast moving fashion business.
Third, a focus on activities allows us to relax several assumptions made in the transaction cost
economics (TCE) literature - for example, that the governance challenges of firms involved in an
exchange will be homogeneous. Focusing on activities allows us to concentrate on the focal firm
that must decide on its business model design, e.g., how to link a new activity into its current busi-
ness model, and who should govern that activity. Indeed, of the two parties involved in a bilateral
exchange, in practice only one - the focal firm - has to make a decision about its business model,
e.g., whether to outsource an activity or not: for its counterpart - a specialized provider of services -
this question is irrelevant. Moreover, much TCE literature assumes homogeneity in firms’ produc-
tion capabilities and costs - assets are assumed to be equally productive in the hands of different
firms, given similar governance arrangements and transaction characteristics. Indeed, in the TCE
analysis of governance structures, production costs are largely determined by transaction attributes
rather than by the attributes of the firms involved in the exchange.20 By contrast, much of the recent
strategy literature acknowledges firms’ differential resource endowments and heterogeneity in the

Long Range Planning, vol 43 2010 223

way these are deployed in activities. An activity systems perspective on business models encourages
the incorporation of those ideas, and thus promotes a synthesis of theoretical perspectives.

[as well as] their transactional dimension, we might consider more

carefully the social aspects of relationships between various business
model participants drawing on different resources.
A fourth advantage of our proposed conceptualization is that it embodies rich possibilities for
further theoretical development and refinement. For example, we might consider more carefully
how activities are produced by organizational actors drawing on various resources - that is, we
might consider the social aspects of relationships between business model participants, as well as
the transactional dimension of their relationships. In their landmark contribution, Weick and
Roberts explain how the ‘heedfully’ performed interrelated actions of organizational actors mini-
mize the risk of serious accidents during the taking off and landing of planes on aircraft carriers.21
These developments are valuable because they point to the importance of social action and inter-
action as the micro-foundations of business model performance. To explore the relationship
between individual actions, organizational activities and business model performance further,
scholars could also draw on activity theory, which has received scant attention in the management
and organization literatures to date.22 The activity system perspective on business models encour-
ages researchers and managers to consider what goes on within the ‘black box’ of activities, and
suggests possibilities for probing deeper and gaining a better understanding of the micro-mecha-
nisms of business models, for example by drawing on social theories of action.
To summarize, the main contribution this paper is to develop an activity system perspective on
the business model. The activity system perspective could be an important step toward fostering
improved empirical understanding of past and current business models, the development of cumu-
lative predictive theory on business model design, and the development of new and exciting busi-
ness models for the future.

Acknowledgements
Christoph Zott gratefully acknowledges the research support of IESE. Raphael Amit acknowledges
the generous research support of the Robert B. Goergen Chair and the Wharton e-Business initia-
tive. Both authors would like to thank the INSEAD-Wharton Alliance Center for Global Research
and Development, which financially supported their research on business models. We also thank
Cesar Guzman-Concha for his research assistance for this article. And, finally, our thanks go to
Charles Baden-Fuller and Ian C. MacMillan, editors of this special issue, for inviting us to contrib-
ute, and for their advice and encouragement during the process.

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224 Business Model Design: An Activity System Perspective

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materials; transforming materials into semifinished products and semifinished products into finished products;
storing and selling the output; extending credit to buyers; etc.’ In a similar vein, Porter defines activities as the
building blocks by which a firm creates a product, contending that potentially valuable differentiation
arises from the choice of activities and how they are performed, and that cost is generated by performing
activities, so activities can be seen as the basic units of competitive advantage.
7. See also the articles by R. G. McGrath on Business models: A discovery driven approach, Long Range
Planning 43(2e3), 247e261 (2010); D. Teece on Business models, business strategy, and innovation,
Long Range Planning 43(2e3), 172e194 (2010).
8. Amit and Zott, 2001 op. cit. at Ref 2.
9. O. E. Williamson, Organizational innovation: the transaction cost approach, in J. Ronen (ed.), Entrepre-
neurship, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, 101e134 (1983).
10. A. Afuah and C. L. Tucci, Internet Business Models and Strategies: Text and Cases, 4, Irwin/McGraw-Hill,
New York, NY (2000); A. Afuah, Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach, McGraw-Hill/Irwin,
New York, NY (2004); M. W. Johnson et al. (2008), op. cit. at Ref. 4; D. Mitchell and C. Coles, The
ultimate competitive advantage of continuing business model innovation, Journal of Business Strategy
24, 15e21 (2003); T. R. Eisenmann, Internet Business Models, McGraw-Hill Irwin, New York: NY
(2002); H. Chesbrough and R. S. Rosenbloom, The role of the business model in capturing value from
innovation: evidence from Xerox Corporation’s technology spinoff companies, Industrial and Corporate
Change 11, 533e534 (2002); M. E. Porter (1985) op. cit. at Ref. 10; H. Chesbrough, Open Business Models,
Harvard Business School Press, Boston: MA (2006).
11. H. Chesbrough (2006) ibid.; G. K. Lee and R. E. Cole, From a firm-based to a community-based model of
knowledge creation: The case of the Linux kernel development, Organization Science 14, 633e649 (2003).
E. Von Hippel and R. Katz, Shifting innovation to users via toolkits, Management Science 48, 821e833 (2002).
12. S. Banerjea, R. Kahn and C. Petit, Dare To Be Different. Why Banking Innovation Matters Now, IBM Global
Services, Somers, NY (2006).
13. See, for example H. Chesbrough, Business model innovation: it’s not just about technology anymore,
Strategy and Leadership 35, 12e17 (2007).
14. K. Nagayama and P. Weill, 7-Eleven Japan Co. Ltd.: Reinventing the Retail Business Model, Sloan School of
Management, Cambridge, MA (2004).
15. D. J. Teece, Strategies for managing knowledge assets: the role of firm structure and industrial context,
Long Range Planning 33, 35e54 (2000).
16. The future of outsourcing (special report), BusinessWeek 50e64 (January 30, 2006).
17. O. E. Williamson, Strategy research: governance and competence perspectives, Strategic Management Journal
20, 1103 (1999).
18. See, for example S. Burdon and A. Bhalla, Lessons from the untold success story: Outsourcing engineering
and facilities management, European Management Journal 23, 576e582 (2005); J. B. Quinn and
F. G. Hilmer, Strategic outsourcing Summer Sloan Management Review 43e55 (1994).
19. Inditex Annual Report 2007 (2008).
20. M. H. Riordan and O. E. Williamson, Asset specificity and economic organization, International Journal of
Industrial Organization 3, 365e378 (1985).

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21. K. E. Weick and K. H. Roberts, Collective mind in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks,
Administrative Science Quarterly 38, 357e381 (1993).
22. For exceptions, see F. Blackler, Knowledge and the theory of organizations: organizations as activity sys-
tems and the reframing of management, Journal of Management Studies 30, 863e884 (1993); P. Jarzab-
kowski, Strategy As Practice: An Activity-Based Approach, Sage, London (2005); J. C. Spender,
Organizations are activity systems, not merely systems of thought, Advances in Strategic Management
12(B), 154e174 (1995); Activity theory was originally developed by Russian psychologists with the objec-
tive of explaining the links between individual thought, behaviour and action, and collective practices in
society (e.g. L. Vygotzki, Mind in Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, (1978). It offers a the-
oretical anchoring of the activity concept that could also be useful for the study of business models.
According to the theory, an activity fulfils a specific need or objective, and involves human action and
interaction. All actions and interactions that contribute toward the fulfillment of the specific need or ob-
jective are part of the activity. Organizational activity can thus be conceived as collective, goal-oriented
action, a social process that is shaped by its context and that in turn shapes the context. These concepts
could help us analyze and understand the origin and evolution of business models better, and the dynam-
ics of business model change.

Biographies
Christoph Zott is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at IESE Business School. His research centers on resource
management in entrepreneurial firms; combining resources through business models; the mobilization of resources
through entrepreneurs’ social influence; the acquisition of private equity; and the deployment of resources through
dynamic capabilities. He has published on these topics in top academic journals, as well as in books. He has taught
courses on entrepreneurship, strategy, and private equity at IESE, INSEAD, and the University of British Columbia.
IESE Business School, Av. Pearson 21, 08034 Barcelona (Spain); Tel: +34 93 602 4096; Fax: +34 93 253 4343; E-mail:
czott@iese.edu.
Raphael (‘‘Raffi’’) Amit is the Robert B. Goergen Professor of Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Management at
the Wharton School, and also Academic Director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Programs which
encompasses all Wharton’s entrepreneurial programs. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics, and received
his Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences from Northwestern University’s J. L. Kellogg Graduate
School of Management. Dr. Amit’s current research and teaching interests center on the design of business models,
on family business management, governance and finance, and on venture capital and private equity investments.
He has published extensively in leading academic journals and is frequently quoted in a broad range of practitioner
outlets. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6370 (USA);
Tel: (215) 898-7731; Fax: (215) 573-7189 E-mail: amit@wharton.upenn.edu.

226 Business Model Design: An Activity System Perspective