Inscribing value on business model innovations: Insights from industrial projects commercializing disruptive digital innovations

• Marketing activities can inscribe value on business model innovation associated with digital innovation.
• In-depth interviews are conducted with thirty-seven members from four industrial projects.
• Individuals cast components of agency and knowledge on business model innovations as a social process.
• Value inscription is mutually constituted from marketing activities, interactions and negotiations.
• Value inscription counters destabilizing forces from commercializing disruptive digital innovations.

In this paper we seek to show how marketing activities inscribe value on business model innovation, representative of an act, or sequence of socially interconnecting acts. Theoretically we ask two interlinked questions: (1) how can value inscriptions contribute to business model innovations? (2) how can marketing activities support the inscription of value on business model innovations? Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the thirty-seven members from across four industrial projects commercializing disruptive digital innovations. Various individuals from a diverse range of firms are shown to cast relevant components of their agency and knowledge on business model innovations through negotiation as an ongoing social process. Value inscription is mutually constituted from the marketing activities, interactions and negotiations of multiple project members across firms and functions to counter destabilizing forces and tensions arising from the commercialization of disruptive digital innovations. This contributes to recent conceptual thinking in the industrial marketing literature, which views business models as situated within dynamic business networks and a context-led evolutionary process. A contribution is also made to debate in the marketing literature around marketing's boundary-spanning role, with marketing activities shown to span and navigate across functions and firms in supporting value inscriptions on business model innovations.