In today’s competitive environment, firms face strong challenges. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment where open innovation is a strategic choice and, on top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized most of these disrupting forces. Incumbent companies must act strategically by adapting their business model to minimize the risk and to capture the new value that emerges. This article intends to contribute to the development of the nascent stream of research that seeks to understand the evolution of Business Models through time—known as Business Model Dynamics (BMD)—and explores how to better align this evolution to the implementation settings of strategy. This exploratory study is built upon a meta-synthesis approach to identify, analyze, and clarify how academics have dealt with the three terms used in the Business Model Dynamics research strand: Business Model Innovation, Business Model Adaptation, and Business Model Evolution. The results of the meta-synthesis show that a disambiguation of concepts is necessary as, from an organizational learning point of view, it is required to provide a better connection between strategic value appropriation and changes on Business Models. This article contributes to the researcher and practitioner’s literature on Business Model Dynamics offering a clear and rigorous definition of each term from a strategic point of view, thus preventing the conceptual incoherence and their reiterated wrong use as synonyms.

Surviving in a humanitarian disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a big challenge for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in all industries. Furthermore, cultural and creative firms face additional challenges. Many of those firms have survived the effects of the pandemic by proposing redesigned business models that have brought new added value in response to environmental hostility; they have strategically responded to the crises by adapting their business model. According to the extant literature, in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environments, dynamic capabilities are developed to detect and seize new opportunities and reconfigure the company’s assets. However, in very hostile environments, such as the COVID-19 crisis, the dynamic capabilities approach fails to explain the firm owners’ strategic decisions. A cross-case comparative analysis of ten micro and small firms in Spain’s cultural and creative industries has been conducted to examine how enterprises adapted to the COVID-19 crisis and the different organizational capabilities they implemented. This work proposes a new framework that postulates that business model adaptation is better understood under the emergency management theory and improvisational capability, instead of only under the dynamic capabilities lens. Organizational proximity in the diffusion of innovations under the open innovation paradigm is also critical to understanding the business model adaptation. From an academic perspective, this article enriches the current understanding of business model asdaptation by micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in very hostile environments. The new framework intends to offer managers concrete guidelines about systematically adapting their business models in hostile situations.

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