How business model innovation affects firm performance in the energy storage market

There is a global goal to reduce carbon emissions and create a more sustainable world. Over the past decades, a growing share of renewable energy resources have been developed to reach this goal. Due to their intermittent nature, these resources make it more difficult for an electrical grid to remain stable as it is designed for slow-reacting, constant, and predictable power plants. This issue can be solved through energy storage for load balancing without using power plants for this operation, and with a reaction time that is much faster than conventional power plants. The implementation of energy storage seems inevitable for a more sustainable future. Still, this market has only slowly started to move in the right direction, with implementation on both large- and small-scale applications awaiting their first successes. An innovative business model may be key to this success. This study investigated how business model innovation affects firm performance in the energy storage market, by measuring firm performance on firms acting in the energy storage market. Four cases were investigated: two large-scale applications using grid-level solutions and two small-scale applications on the consumer level. Results show that business model innovation affects firm performance in the energy storage market. With current legislation limiting a true new value proposition, for large-scale applications, the business model innovation with an efficiency design theme results in higher environmental performance and, therefore, increased customer satisfaction. For small-scale applications, a business model innovation with a complementarities theme results in increased numbers of partnerships, customer segments, and channels, contributing to higher customer satisfaction through a more complete and innovative product-value proposition to the customer. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.