ESTT members contributed to the Strategic Management Society (SMS) Annual Conference in Minneapolis with the paper “Business Model Portfolio Configurations and Firm Performance: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis in the Airline Industry”. The abstract is as follows:

Recently, scholars have shifted their attention to studying a firm’s simultaneous operation of multiple BMs, i.e. investigating the emergence of and interactions between two or more distinct BMs in a firm. Still, empirical studies in this context are rare, especially when it comes to the evaluation of the impact of different BM portfolio configurations on firm performance. We conduct a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to study successful (and unsuccessful) configurations of BM portfolios (over time) in the global airline industry. Over the time, we observe nine different successful configurations of airline carriers’ BM portfolios. Moreover, we observe that none of these successful configurations feature the no-frills BM and mostly require its absence.