Diaspora Business Model Innovation

Abstract

This paper explores how diasporans achieve business model innovatin by using their unique resources. The hypothesis underlying the paper is that the unique backgrounds and resources of the diaspora businesses, due to diffrent sources of informatin and experiences as well as multile networks, contributes to business model innovatin in a distictie manner. We investiate the English school market in the Philippines which is established by East Asian diaspora who innovate a business model of conventinal English schools. Two case studies were conducted with Japanese diaspora English schools. Their business is analyzed using a business model canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) and contrasted with the conventinal business model. The empirical cases show that diaspora businesses use knowledge about their country of origin and engage with country of residence and multile networks in diffrent locatins and constellatins to identiy unique opportunitis, leading to a business model innovatin.

Keywords

• business model canvas
• east Asian diaspora
• transnational entrepreneurship
• opportunity recognition
• mixed embeddedness