The design of business models : what, how and why

Over the last decade, management and organisation scholars, practitioners and policymakers alike have increasingly paid attention to business models and variously highlighted the importance of designing them. However, what it means, in essence, to design business models, remains unclear. The received literature reveals a highly fragmented and heterogeneous picture, with different interpretations and implicit meanings of the term 'design', leading to varied perspectives on what, how and why business models should be designed. In this editorial I attempt to clarify the meaning of 'the design of business model' by providing a framework that will hopefully help synthesise, organise and clarify the multifaceted aspects of designing business models. Additionally, I highlight three emerging meta insights from the nine papers published in this Special Issue: 1) the (importance of) integration of design principles, 2) the need for specialised, context-dependent design methods and tools and 3) the potential of technology, particularly AI, to reshape business model design. These insights offer pathways for advancing the understanding and practice of designing business models that, combined with an appreciation of the different aspects of designing business models, will hopefully encourage and shape future research directions and cumulative progress in this field.