Conversation on Business Models and Cognition
Sea Matilda Bez ()
Additional contact information
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
Post-Print from HAL
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.
Keywords: FOLF; Business Model; Cognition; Open Innovation; Inside-out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07-29
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed
Published in Academy of Management, Jul 2021, online, United States
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03189031
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().