Business Model Innovations in Deep Tech: A Study of Repurposing Dynamic Capabilities for Resilience

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Abstract
This study examines how business model innovations (BMI) generate dynamic capabilities (DCs) for organizational resilience. Drawing on the interaction of BMI as a change process and DCs perspectives, we study this question through twelve deep tech ventures facing compounding technical, market, commercial, and social uncertainties. We identify five business model design moves that deep tech ventures adopt to navigate these uncertainties. We map these five design moves to the sensing-seizing-transforming framework, showing that they generate a resilience capability stack comprising versatility, flexibility, adaptability, and collaboration. Tracing disruption episodes across our cases, we identify a mechanism we term capability repurposing where DCs generated through BMI for one function can be redirected to serve a different function when disruptions demand it. Sensing capabilities built for market detection were redirected toward market repositioning; seizing capabilities built for operational execution enabled strategic pivots; and transforming capabilities built through ecosystem governance sustained reconfiguration while ventures adapted. Critically, we identify ecosystem co-development as a necessary condition such that without it, sensing and seizing capabilities remain available but cannot be deployed for resilience. Our study extends BMI research by specifying the change process through which BMI generates DCs for resilience, and contributes to the DCs literature by operationalizing sensing-seizing-transforming at the business model level. For practitioners, we offer a diagnostic framework linking BMI patterns to specific capabilities, enabling managers to identify which design moves are present and where gaps in their resilience architecture exist.

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