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Business Model
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What is Business Model?

A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value — defining the relationship between a company, its customers, and the market it operates in. Business courses across management, strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizational development regularly ask students to examine business models because they sit at the intersection of planning, operations, and competitive positioning. The topic is academically interesting precisely because no single framework applies universally; models must account for the specific services a company provides, the customers it targets, and the broader market conditions it faces.

The papers archived on this topic approach business models from several distinct angles. Case-study analysis is common, with papers examining specific organizations — including Skype, Telstra, and Redbox — to evaluate how their models perform under real conditions. Other papers take a strategic lens, linking business model design to human resources, finance, and organizational change. Some focus on emerging technologies such as RFID and cloud computing to explore how innovation forces companies to rethink service delivery and management structures. Still others address sector-specific challenges, such as attracting and retaining teachers or assessing the productivity of teleworking arrangements.

A strong essay on this topic begins with a clearly scoped thesis that connects a company's model to a specific outcome — growth, failure, competitive advantage, or adaptation. Evidence drawn from operational data, market behavior, and organizational structure tends to carry the most weight. One common pitfall is treating a business model as a static snapshot; strong essays account for how models evolve in response to changing customer needs, market pressures, and internal management decisions.

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Paper Doctorate
Land's End multi-channel retailing strategy and competitive advantage
Land's End is a world leader in multi-channel retailing and multi-channel management, selling online, over the telephone, through its own stores, affiliate stores and through Sears' larger retail outlets.
Paper Undergraduate
Ethical boundaries in competitive intelligence practices
Ethics and competitive intelligence: Competitive or business intelligence contributes to the strategic plan of an organization by providing needed information so that the business can accurately judge the market, market…
Paper Undergraduate
Creativity and innovation in business competitiveness and organizational performance
In this paper, we are discussing what mindset individuals must have to be successful in business. As this is playing an increasingly important part, in helping to determine how successful a firm will be in the future. Once this is completed, we provide a sample survey that can be used to see the extent of how these ideas are being embraced by executives around the world.
Essay Doctorate
Kmart's decline and competitive challenges in retail
In this paper, a financial analysis is conducted on Kmart for the years prior to and immediately following its Chapter 11 filing in 2002. The analysis seeks to determine what went wrong with the company and what steps it took to restore its financial health.
Paper Undergraduate
Comparative analysis of Qantas, Virgin Blue, and Air Australia Airways
This paper compares and contrasts the organizational cultures of three of Australia's major airlines. It assesses their labor relations, leadership, and overall goals in the currently troubled marketplace. It concludes with advising investors on what is the best selection of all three airlines in which to invest, in terms of likely ROI in 10 years.
Paper Undergraduate
E-commerce, mass customization, and product configuration for revenue growth
The Impact of e-Commerce on Mass Customization and Revenue Growth
Paper Masters
FedEx's global logistics integration and unified marketing strategy challenges
FedEx Corporation (NYSE:FDX) has grown from a package and freight forwarding delivery service to become one of the most vertically integrated logistics providers operating on a global scale today. FedEx was able to set an achieve a series of very aggressive growth objectives through acquisition, creating a global logistics and freight forwarding system unrivaled today. What the case analysis also implies is how well FedEx manages its global acquisitions through a highly integrated strategy of process and IT integration. FedEx is known for being one of the most advanced logistics companies operating today in their use of Information Technologies (IT) for the automation of supply chain operations (Alghalith, 2007). FedEx has struggled to unify their entire company into a single value proposition, allowing each business unit to have its own identity. While this has been very good for the two top-performing units, FedEx Express and FedEx Ground, the remainder of the company is not as clearly defined. This is one of the most strategic marketing challenges the company has today. FedEx is also formidable due to their strengths in large-scale operations, use of analytics to track performance and gain greater efficiencies, and exceptional brand value, FedEx still is struggling with the marketing challenge of transitioning into a global logistics provider. The intent of this analysis is to complete a SWOT analysis, provide a problem statement related to the case, define three strategic alternatives, provide a strategic recommendation and marketing implementation. FedEx's direction for the future will be defined.
Essay Doctorate
The International Committee of the Red Cross: history, mandate, and governance structure
International Red Cross is governed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was established in 1863. Its main function is to provide humanitarian support and help especially for those affected by…
Paper Undergraduate
Apple's iTunes expansion strategy and EU legal environment adaptation
¶ … online music rights" highlights the environmental aspect of strategic management. Apple wished to set up an online iTunes store to service the entire European Union, but the union's rules forbid it to do so.
Essay Doctorate
Apple's value chain strategy and organizational response to market complexity
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has emerged as one of the most profitable and prolific companies in the world, generating a market capitalization rate of $623B as of this writing in late August, 2012, delivering $148B in Revenues in their latest fiscal year and $40B in Net Income (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). One of Apple's greatest strengths is its ability to quickly translate innovative product concepts and designs into state-of-the-art products that deliver exceptional customer experiences. Apple has honed this through decades of disciplined execution and a continual focus on creating a highly synchronized supply chain, highly collaborative product design and development workflows, and the ability to take concepts to completed products in a fraction of the time of their competitors (Murray, Goode, Muro, 2010). Apple is credited with creating the smartphone market, tablet PC, cloud-based music buying and delivery service (iTunes), centralized document and image storage (iCloud) and more innovations in operating systems in the last five years than Microsoft (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). All of these accomplishments taken together have led to Apple creating a catalyst of growth in the tablet PC market, fueling a 100%+ increase in iPad sales (13% year over year) and iPhone sales that have increased 152% over the last eighteen months as well (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). Apple continues to accelerate the sales of their iPad, iPhone, iTouch devices in addition to its mainstream laptops and systems. Apple is able to accomplish these significant results by concentrating on the execution of its value chain, a decades-only concept that Dr. Michael Porter originally created to illustrate how the functional departments of a company all must be synchronized to deliver profitability (Porter, 2008). Apple's value chain is exceptionally effective in managing the coordinating of supply chain, sourcing, quality management, production, product design, marketing services, logistics and retailing operations. As long as two decades ago Apple had been concentrating on how to create this level of synchronization across their entire enterprise (Larson, 1994). As the business model of Apple has continually become more complex, the ability of the organization to stay agile and quick to respond has increasingly become more difficult. This is a common problem companies have as they grow in size and complexity of their business models. For Apple, the environmental factors in the areas of economic, social, technological and political change have challenged their ability to grow, and also forced them to create a more market-driven organizational structure, abandoning the highly successful product divisions of the 1990s and early 2000 timeframe (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how Apple is managing to continually grow despite economic, social, technological and political environmental forces impacting their business. In addition, an analysis of their market environment, response to the turbulent economic environment they operate in, the nature of their product strategies, an assessment of their strategic direction and strategic options are all included in this analysis. A separate section is included for each of these areas throughout the analysis. The Porter Fives Forces Model is used for analyzing these market dynamics (Porter, 2008).