Open Questions on Cognition and Business Modelling

The cognitive turn in business model research has been lauded as holding great promise. The business model can thus be approached as a cognitive construct, a kind of mental map or model of how the business creates and appropriates value. This construct exists in the minds of internal and external stakeholders of the organization and is shaped, shared, and adapted over time. In some incumbent firms, multiple business models may emerge and co-exist, leading to a particular set of challenges to the host organization. Over the past decade, in an effort to document all this, the emergent literature on cognition and business models has seemingly moved in many different directions. This can lead to some degree of confusion for the reader new to this field, especially as for every research question answered, several new ones seem to appear. In this chapter, I conclude this book by very briefly discussing the main existing directions of research and propose a way to structure the identification of open research questions.