Reinventing the Firm

This open access book explains how firms achieve strategic renewal by redesigning their business models in a high-growth, post-transition economy, using Poland as a natural laboratory for studying renewal. It shows how Polish companies use business model innovation (BMI) to sustain competitive advantage under turbulence, balancing exploration and exploitation while transforming legacy structures and routines. Strategic renewal is treated as an ongoing, complex process of transformation, for which BMI serves as a vehicle.

Drawing on mixed-methods research with 400 internationally oriented firms and eight in-depth case studies, the book investigates how organizations initiate, structure, and sustain BMI under global competition and post-transition complexity. It examines how firms navigate alternative strategic logics (co-alignment vs co-creation), structural choices (pivot-first, layering, selective parallel models), and innovation modes (internal vs open innovation). Rather than depicting renewal as a linear fit, it conceptualizes it as a fluid, tension-laden journey in which firms continually negotiate efficiency and innovation, stability and experimentation, exploitation and exploration. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of innovation, strategy and international business.