8th June – Professor Mari Sako (Saïd Business School, Oxford) and Dr Panos
Desyllas (Manchester Business School)
Title: Profiting from Business Model Innovation: Evidence from Pay-as-You-Drive Auto
Insurance
Abstract: The emergent business model literature, revolving mainly around the mechanisms
through which new business models create and deliver value, has left the value capture
challenge under-explored. This paper examines how an incumbent firm profits from business
model innovation through the study of Pay-As-You-Drive auto-insurance. Although business
models do not warrant formal intellectual property (IP) protection, their constituent
components (e.g. business methods and brands) often do. Drawing on the profiting-frominnovation framework, we find that formal and strategic IP protection methods play
complementary roles. Initially, formal IP rights are used primarily as a defensive strategy, as
vehicles for packaging and trading know-how, and most importantly as a means of "buying
time" to build specialised complementary assets. Long-term competitiveness, however,
depends on whether the innovator builds a strong position in specialised complementary
assets and is capable of reconfiguring them over time in line with changes in the market
environment. Thus, we explicate the complex mechanism and dynamic capability for
capturing value from business model innovation.
Bio: Dr Panos Desyllas is Lecturer in Business Economics and Strategy at Manchester
Business School. He was a research associate at Cambridge's Centre for Business
Research and an Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) post-doctoral research fellow at
the Said Business School, Oxford University. He holds a first class BSc in Economics from
University College, London and an MPhil in Economics from Churchill College,
Cambridge. In 2005 he completed an award winning PhD in Business Economics and
Management at Cambridge's Judge Business School, where he was an ESRC and Lloyd's
of London scholar. Currently, he is Principal Investigator on an ESRC grant on "Using
intellectual property protection to capture value from innovation in knowledge-intensive
service firms".
Mari Sako is Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School, Oxford. Mari has
20 years' experience of researching about global strategy, resulting in the publication of five
books and numerous articles in management and economics journals. Her books include
Prices, Quality and Trust (1992) and Shifting Boundaries of the Firm (2006). As a Senior
Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), Mari's research was on
productivity and innovation in business services, the impact of outsourcing on professions,
and origins of the creation of shared and outsourced services. As a member of the Novak
Druce Centre for Professional Service Firms, she carries out research on the globalisation of
law firms and the impact of legal process outsourcing on the legal profession. After reading
PPE at Oxford, Mari studied for an MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics
and an MA in Economics at Johns Hopkins University, before completing her PhD at London
University in 1990. She is President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics
(SASE) during 2011-12.