ABSTRACT
According to Day (2011), adaptive marketing capabilities (AMC) can make the adaptation of existing business models more effective, especially when firms are confronted to chaotic and nonlinear market changes. Evidence suggests that AMC enhance the business performance (Maryanti, 2019) the international performance (Reimann, 2021), the market performance of B2B firms (Guo et al., 2018), as well as the innovation performance (Ali, 2021;Shen, 2020). However, little is known about how AMC contribute to the proper adaptation of the business model components, particularly in a context of crisis. Our objective is therefore to test the potential contribution of AMC, as internal drivers of the Business Model Innovation process, in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building upon the literature on AMC and BMI (Day, 2011;Foss & Saebi, 2018;Moorman & Day, 2016), we posit that Adaptive market experimentation capabilities (AMC) and Open marketing capabilities (OMC) (i) complement each other and (ii) contribute to the adaptive process by which SMEs succeed to properly align the three dimensions of their business model according to the new conditions (value proposition, value creation and value capture). From March to September 2021, in partnership with the economic department of Ville de Montréal, we collected 173 online self-administered questionnaires from Canadian SMEs, most of them (76%) having fewer than 20 employees. Measures were adapted from existing scales (Guo et al., 2018;Miroshnychenko et al., 2020;Spieth & Schneider, 2016) and we tested our model using a PLS-SEM approach. Our results confirm that the OMC (i) contribute to reinforce the AMC and (ii) significantly enhance the overall adaptation of the business model, but only through its value creation and value capture dimensions. On the contrary, the analysis shows that AMC do not seem to have a significant impact on the overall BM adaptation as they only enhance the value creation facet of the adaptive process. The potential contributions of these findings are of two folds. First, we shed lights on the potential contribution of two complementary adaptive marketing capabilities (AMC and OMC) in the process by which SMEs strive to adjust their business model in a context of economic crisis. Second, contrary to the initial premises made by Day (2011), results show that these two internal drivers do not contribute equally to this evolutionary process. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.