Measuring Digital Business Models Maturity: Theory, Framework, and Empirical Validation

The unprecedented development of digital technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic environment have accelerated digital transformation in all industries, forcing companies of all types and sizes to change the way they operate. In such an environment, companies need to quickly adapt their business models and demonstrate ability to implement strategic changes that would result in creating and delivering new value with digital business models (DBMs). Innovation and continuous improvement of a DBM lead to its higher maturity and resilience to unexpected changes. Given that the development and implementation of a DBM is often very unpredictable and the relevant literature is still scarce, many questions on how to develop an effective and sufficiently mature DBM remain unanswered. To contribute to finding the relevant answers, this article explores which aspects are important for the maturity of a DBM and how DBM maturity can be measured, particularly for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In order to address such a research question, each of the three components of a DBM (content, experience, and platform) was empirically tested through a structured survey questionnaire on a sample of 162 SME companies from 42 countries in 5 continents. The article contributes to research literature by proposing and empirically validating a framework for measuring DBM maturity, particularly for SMEs. The measurement framework has been found to be consistent and reliable. Furthermore, the article found that user-generated content and user experience tracking are very important aspects to address for reaching and sustaining DBM maturity, but a high proportion of surveyed companies did not pay due attention to their implementation. This finding contributes to identifying tangible improvement areas for the comparable type of companies.