Identifying business models with the use of metadata

In the current dynamic and competitive environment, access to detailed information on firms is becoming increasingly important for accurately identifying corporate business models (BMs) and companies’ business model complementarities, which in turn may lead to collaborations and partnerships. Our study aims to provide a reliable and updated representation of what companies are and what actually do, and to show how companies can be linked to each other based on their BM similarities. To this end, we put forward a bottom-up approach which gathers information on firms’ products, technologies, know-how and other BM-related characteristics from the corporate websites, and which, through the tool of the network analysis, allows us to identify a number of clusters that differ in terms of business model profile and economic performance. We apply this procedure to a sample of Italian manufacturing firms located in the Marche region, where five well-defined clusters emerge.