The Observable Business Model

Business model representation is used for transferring strategic corporate information in the process of business model innovation. Most of the existing representations are descriptive, and the literature lacks a general representation separating business phenomena and supporting explanatory research. The conceptual paper aims to fill the gap and is based on literature review. The study also uses Hall's encoding-decoding framework to find the challenging grounds of the current business model representations using some empirical data. It found how strategic information is encoded in the process of business model innovation and how the encoded information is decoded. Then, the study refines the concept 'value' and introduces a Business Value Triad at the heart of an Observable Business Model. The new representation helps researchers with designing explanatory research, and guides practitioners to separate the realized business from the planned business in the process of venture building and/or business model innovation.