Digital transformation and business model innovation: a bibliometric analysis of existing research and future perspectives

Digital technologies, which are fundamentally different from traditional technologies, are driving radical changes across all industries, supply chains, consumer preferences, competition, and more. These radical shifts create challenges and opportunities for firms to create and capture value from business model innovation. The challenge goes beyond simply implementing advanced digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) to developing business model innovations to create and capture value. Essentially, there is a complementary, mutually reinforcing relationship between digital transformation (DT) and business model innovation (BMI). However, the current understanding of the relationship between DT and BMI remains unclear, despite growing academic interest in this relationship. We endeavor to map the intellectual structure of this emerging research field at the intersection of DT and BMI over a 24-year period (from January 1999 to December 2023). The goal is to harness the fragmented literature, thereby creating a coherent basis for understanding its separate perspectives and issues. Using bibliometric analysis, we identified several key themes around which the extant literature can be organized. We also identified several areas where further research is warranted.