Business Model

Michael Lewis (2000: pages 256-257) scoffed at the whole attempt to formalize the definition of business models when he wrote that " "Business Model" is one of those terms of art that were central to the Internet boom: it glorifies all manner of half baked plans. All it really meant was how you planned to make money."

In an abstract of his paper "A Mesoscopic Approach to Business Models: Nano Research on Management" published in "Economic Issues in China" Dr. Junyi Weng stated that "Business Model, a well known important and extensively used term by media, management consultancy and business top managers, is just in an embarrassment that there is no consensus about its definition and few papers in academic periodicals."

He designed and discusses his conception of business models based interfaces interacting in interior and exterior business environments. (See below)

FIG 1

FIG 2

Peter Weill, Thomas W. Malone, Victoria T. D'Urso, George Herman and Stephanie Woerner of MIT in their paper "Do Some Business Models Perform Better than others?: A Study of the 1000 Largest US Firms" agree that the concept of business models is while widely discussed is seldom systematically discussed. The paper then proceeds to postulate a conceptual framework for comprehensively classifying business models. These consist of four basic types of business models (Creator, Landlord, Distributor and Broker), which are each broken down into four variants accordance with type of assets they deal in (physical, financial, intangible and human). Thus giving rise to 16 specialised business Model types."

Professor Michael Rappa like many others prefer to present a comprehensive and cogent taxonomy of basic categories as observed on the web as follows:

Brokerage
Advertising
Infomediary
Merchant
Manufacturer (Direct)
Affiliate
Community
Subscription
Utility

He however, does not believe that these are exhaustive and expects new and interesting variations in the future.