Business model imitation: definition and typology

Abstract

The main idea of the article says that the concept BM imitation (BMIm) has not been developed adequately in the strategic management field, even though it has been greatly used recently by researchers. Therefore, the aim of our research is to propose a definition of BMIm and to highlight the distinction between several types of BMIm. On the ground of this, we will clarify the ambiguities in the literature related to this concept, and show that imitating a competitor's BM does not necessarily mean imitating all the components of a BM