Business model innovation in the banking sector: How digital technologies transform innovation drivers in value mechanisms innovations

Business model innovation (BMI) involves innovating firms’ value creation, delivery, and capture. This paper categorizes the key drivers of BMI, i.e., crucial factors that trigger BMI and sustain the innovation of firms’ value mechanisms, emphasizing how to transform innovation drivers into value mechanisms’ innovations thanks to digital technologies. Through the longitudinal study of four banks’ BMI, we identified three innovation drivers (i.e., globalization, crisis, and customer expectations), triggering three distinct BMI phases (i.e., “stretching”, “streamlining”, and “synergizing”). Findings reveal that the transformation of innovation drivers into value mechanisms innovations requires a growing application of digital technologies across the three phases.