Leveraging knowledge management systems for business modelling in technology start-ups: an exploratory study

Business model (BM) creation and development for Technological Start-ups (TSs) strongly grounds on knowledge assets. Despite such relevance, it emerges the paucity of research on BM within the knowledge-based research streams, and specifically for TSs that need a proper digital-enabled knowledge management system (KMS) to ensure the effective organisation of their knowledge assets. To investigate such issues, a study on the relationships between BM and knowledge assets grouped by the Intellectual Capital (IC) elements has been carried out by submitting a semi-structured questionnaire to a sample of 52 Italian TSs. Results show that both the foundation and innovation of BM rely mainly on human capital, followed by relational and structural capital. The study identifies also the trajectories that TSs follow to define their BM by leveraging their IC, and the enabling conditions. The paper ends with a discussion about how digital-enabled KMS can support the exploitation of IC for TSs.