IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03189031.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Conversation on Business Models and Cognition

Author

Listed:
  • Sea Matilda Bez

    (MRM - Montpellier Research in Management - UPVM - Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 - UPVD - Université de Perpignan Via Domitia - Groupe Sup de Co Montpellier (GSCM) - Montpellier Business School - UM - Université de Montpellier, Labex Entreprendre - UM - Université de Montpellier)

Abstract

Successful business models (BMs) contain a dark side that is often overlooked: a successful model can cause managers to filter out technologies that are promising but do not fit their current BMs (Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002). These promising but rejected technologies can be called "false negative" technologies and end up unused and unknown (Chesbrough, 2003). A more recent branch of the BM literature advises to allow unused and unknown technologies to flow to the outside (Chesbrough 2019; Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2011). However, these flows of technologies outside the companies are rarely practiced. My research co-authored with Henry Chesbrough searched for an explanation with a cognitive perspective for barriers that limit the technologies to flow outside the company, and thus limit development of new BMs (Bez and Chesbrough, 2021). We found an explanation, what we call the Fear of Looking Foolish (FOLF) effect. FOLF is a behavioral constraint generated by a successful BM that consists of preferring to allow a technology to languish rather than being referred to an external partner. Managers fear to look foolish if the latent value of the denied technology is revealed. They feel safer not to let it flow outside. This FOLF greatly inhibits the chance to allow unused internal technologies to go outside for others to use in their businesses and BMs. Yet to our knowledge, this behavior has not yet been introduced into the academic literature on searching, designing, or improving BMs. We suggest that this is an oversight, and that organizations may be leaving money on the table by not opening unused internal technologies to others for them to evaluate and use in their businesses and BMs.

Suggested Citation

  • Sea Matilda Bez, 2021. "Conversation on Business Models and Cognition," Post-Print hal-03189031, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03189031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03189031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.