THE EVOLUTION AND PLACE OF THE BUSINESS MODEL WITHIN THE NEW WORLD OF DIGITAL BUSINESS
Business model researchers are attempting to determine its meaning, boundaries, components, and relationships with other
business aspects, such as business processes and business strategy.Magretta (2002) argues that the business strategy explains how
Al-Debei et al. Defining the Business Model
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Toronto, ON, Canada August 14th-17th 2008 5
business organizations hope to do better than their rivals, whilst the business model describes how the pieces of a business all
fit together. They see the business model as an interface or an
intermediate theoretical layer between the business strategy and the business processes (Osterwalder, 2004; Tikkanen et al.,
2005; Rajala and Westerlund, 2005; Morris et al., 2005).Some researchers see them as identical and use the terms interchangeably: Kallio et al. (2006) depict business
model components as a set of business strategies.Figure 1.