The Business Model as Mediator during Socio-Technical Transitions – Empirical Evidence from Applied AI Technology Startups in the Energy and Transportation Sector.

Firms are an important driver of socio-technical transitions, where a technological innovation moves from a protected niche to a new dominant socio-technical regime. The firm's business model functions as an important mediator during this process, articulating a shared vision of what the technology can do. Following recent calls for a closer examination of the business model’s role during socio-technical transitions, we study 375 startups that develop applied AI technologies. Based on a large-scale semantic analysis of the startup’s website texts, we ran a statistical hierarchical clustering and identified three distinct roles: (1) expansion of the technology in scale and scope, (2) exploration of the technology in-depth, (3) new ways of interacting with technology.