The impact of metaverse for business model innovation: A review, novel insights and research directions

Digital transformation is changing the way businesses operate. Emerging technologies have the ability to impact products, processes, value chains, networks, and business models. In this panorama, metaverse offers to businesses and consumers new ways to interact with each other, toward the establishment of new virtual and interconnected spaces. Although, business have rapidaly adopted metaverse technologies for several purposes, the metaverse research field is still in its infancy, and there is a lack of understanding of meanings, purposes, and opportunities. With the aim of providing an historical overview, this study examines the role of metaverse in business model innovation, unveiling the elements introduced by this emerging technology that can affect companies' business models, the changes that metaverse generates over time in value creation and value capture actions, and the sectors most involved in this transformation. A systematic literature review with a double layer of analysis was conducted (bibliometric and content analysis). Our results reveal that over time, metaverse generated three waves of impacts on companies' business models. For each wave, the actions of value creation and capture enabled by metaverse were identified and the sectors involved in this transformation over time were summarized. Results were discussed in order to debate the capability of metaverse to generate new actions of value creation according to radical, incremental, and exaptation paths of innovation and the consequent capability to capture value among several stakeholders. Salient research gaps emerged and future research directions were proposed.