1. Introduction
In a business environment where the characteristics of the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) era are increasingly prominent and sudden crisis events keep emerging [
1], why can some business models continuously create value for enterprises and their stakeholders, while others fail to support enterprises in successfully weathering business crises? Based on previous research, whether an enterprise’s business model is resilient can effectively answer this question [
2]. Resilience is understood as the ability of a system to continue to function and achieve its goals when facing challenges [
3]. It reflects the system’s capacity to rapidly recover from adversity and utilize relevant resources for effective decision making [
4]. On this basis, business model resilience can be defined as the ability of an enterprise’s business model to resist the interference of the external volatile environment, enabling the enterprise to quickly recover from a crisis and even exceed its original production capacity, continuously creating value [
5]. Generally speaking, a highly resilient business model exhibits a high degree of flexibility and adaptability [
6]. It can often assist an enterprise in rapidly recovering from a crisis and even achieving a comeback in an adverse situation [
5]. Conversely, if a business model lacks resilience, when facing sudden crisis events, it is often difficult for the enterprise to turn the situation around, and its business model may be damaged or even destroyed. Therefore, in today’s increasingly volatile business environment with frequent adverse events, enhancing business model resilience to continuously create value urgently requires the high attention of researchers.
As a specific manifestation of resilience in the context of business models, business model resilience, to a certain extent, reflects the sustainable and hard-to-replicate competitive advantages of an enterprise. According to the dynamic capability theory, dynamic capability refers to an enterprise’s ability to efficiently integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external knowledge, resources, and skills [
7]. As a dynamic and high-order ability, it has the function of optimizing the organizational mode on which the organization depends for survival. When the existing organizational mode fails to adapt to the changes in internal and external environmental goals and becomes inefficient or even ineffective [
8], dynamic capability can play a crucial role in enabling the enterprise to maintain long-term performance [
9], establish long-term competitive advantages, and adapt to a rapidly changing environment [
7,
10]. Based on this, enterprise dynamic capability may be an important antecedent for enhancing business model resilience. Furthermore, in contrast to the traditional resource-based view which mainly adopts a static perspective, the dynamic capability theory places enterprises in a dynamic development process. It holds that relying solely on the enterprise’s original resource advantages is difficult for the enterprise to establish and maintain sustainable competitive advantages. Coupled with an increasingly volatile and fierce competition in the business environment, enterprises urgently need to re-integrate their internal and external resources according to external environmental changes [
11]. This means that enterprises should actively perceive changes in the external environment and can reconstruct their resource base through cooperation with other stakeholders in the business system [
12], ultimately forming an ability that can bring sustainable competitive advantages to the enterprise [
13]. This requires us to further explore the sources of dynamic capability that contribute to enhancing business model resilience.
Dynamic capability theory posits that an enterprise’s dynamic capability does not merely reside within the enterprise nor remain static. Instead, they gradually take shape and develop during the interaction process between the enterprise and its external environment [
14]. In the current era of user economy, the development of emerging technologies such as big data and AI is gradually altering the power and status of users in the course of enterprise development [
15]. As one of the enterprise’s stakeholders, users are no longer just the purchasers and beneficiaries of enterprise products and services, they have become a crucial source for enterprises to acquire heterogeneous market knowledge and significant value-based resources [
16]. Based on this, an increasing number of enterprises have started to engage in interaction behaviors with users, and the aim is to excavate valuable resources from the in-depth perspective of users, thereby achieving the integration, reconstruction, and re-configuration of the enterprise’s internal and external resources. By continuously enhancing the enterprise’s dynamic capability [
7], the continuous and efficient operation of the enterprise’s business model can ultimately be ensured. However, a review of existing research reveals that both domestic and foreign scholars’ research on business model resilience mostly focuses on the enterprise-centered perspective. They mainly explore the impacts of individual (such as enterprise employees, entrepreneurs) characteristics and their behaviors on business model resilience from perspectives such as knowledge empowerment and network theory [
17]. Moreover, these studies are mostly qualitative, and there is a lack of quantitative research methods based on the dynamic capability theory to explore how enterprise–user interaction can enhance enterprise dynamic capability and ultimately enhance business model resilience. To some extent, this may lead to the ambiguity in the formation mechanism of business model resilience. On the other hand, regarding the research on enterprise–user interaction, previous scholars mainly focused on its impacts on aspects such as product innovation performance [
18], product innovation paths, and user innovation performance [
19]. They seldom explored, from the theoretical perspective of dynamic capability, whether enterprise–user interaction can accelerate the enterprise’s integration and reconstruction of its resource base. Although some scholars have pointed out that this interaction behavior is conducive to the innovation of the business model [
20], they have not investigated the impact mechanism of this interaction behavior on business model resilience. To a certain extent, this weakens the theoretical explanation of enterprise–user interaction.
In fact, in today’s increasingly volatile business environment, enterprise–user interaction offers a new research perspective for enhancing business model resilience. In a rapidly changing market environment, valuable, scarce, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources constitute an important foundation for the formation of an enterprise’s dynamic capability [
11,
14]. Enterprise–user interaction, as an interaction behavior between an enterprise and its stakeholders, provides a favorable channel for the enterprise to acquire valuable and scarce resources. During the process of interacting with users, the enterprise can deeply excavate rich user-demand information and heterogeneous resources from the user’s perspective [
18]. Moreover, in the continuous process of interaction, the enterprise can innovatively update and allocate its internal and external resources. It can continuously renew the value-creation logic of its business model, enhancing the adaptability and sustainability of the business model in the commercial environment. Furthermore, the formation of enterprise dynamic capability requires two major processes: resource identification and allocation [
11]. However, in the actual business environment, due to the dual influence of environmental complexity and the enterprise’s actual goals, a large number of resources obtained through enterprise–user interaction may be difficult to efficiently allocate into valuable resources required for enhancing dynamic capability. In other words, only through efficient integration and allocation can the resources acquired from enterprise–user interaction contribute to improving enterprise dynamic capability and further strengthening business model resilience [
9]. From the perspective of the planning view, enterprise dynamic capability is continuously accumulated under the strategic plans formulated by leaders [
21]. The individual characteristics of leaders will, to a certain extent, affect the transformation process of enterprise resources, thus determining the evolution of the dynamic capability. Based on this, from the perspective of the leadership style, we introduce the moderating variable of knowledge-oriented leadership to explain the mechanism of enterprise integration and allocation of heterogeneous knowledge resources. Knowledge-oriented leaders attach importance to the role of knowledge in enterprise development and encourage employees to actively engage in knowledge learning and resource innovation [
22,
23]. Under this influence, the user resources obtained after enterprise–user interaction will be more efficiently allocated into valuable and unique resources. This promotes the renewal and reconstruction of the enterprise’s resource base, strengthens the positive impact of enterprise–user interaction on enterprise dynamic capability, and further enhances the indirect effect of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience through enterprise dynamic capability.
Based on the aforementioned analysis, this study explores the impact mechanism of enterprise–user interaction on enhancing business model resilience from the perspective of dynamic capability theory, and deeply analyzes the mediating role of enterprise dynamic capability and the moderating role of knowledge-oriented leadership. This study has certain research contributions in terms of theoretical extension, empirical innovation, and practical relevance. Firstly, in terms of theoretical extension, this study is distinct from traditional research on dynamic capability. Starting from the perspective of enterprise–user interaction, it explores how the user information and resources obtained after enterprise–user interaction are transformed into the enterprise’s resource base, thereby enhancing business model resilience, as well as the moderating role of knowledge-oriented leadership in this process. This new theoretical framework not only deepens the understanding of the dynamic capability theory in the context of enterprise–user interaction, expands the scope and applicable scenarios of the dynamic capability theory, but also provides a more comprehensive theoretical explanation for the formation mechanism of business model resilience in the era of knowledge economy. Secondly, in terms of empirical innovation, this study uses methods such as structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression to confirm the positive impact of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience, the mediating role of enterprise dynamic capability, and the positive moderating role of knowledge-oriented leadership. Finally, in terms of practical relevance, this study provides guidance for enterprise practices in the era of knowledge economy. Enterprises should regard enterprise–user interaction as a key strategy, formulate personalized enterprise–user interaction strategies based on their actual situations, use diversified interaction channels and methods to obtain heterogeneous user information and resources, and reshape enterprise dynamic capability on this basis to enhance business model resilience. At the same time, as the helmsmen of the enterprise development path, leaders should clearly recognize the crucial role of heterogeneous knowledge resources in the sustainable development of enterprises, and continuously strengthen the positive effects of enterprise–user interaction on enterprise dynamic capability and business model resilience.
5. Conclusions
5.1. Findings
Based on the dynamic capability theory and from the perspective of enterprise–user interaction, this study aims to explore the internal logic and mechanism through which enterprise–user interaction influences the business model resilience. It mainly probes into the three following research questions: Firstly, how does enterprise–user interaction affect business model resilience? Secondly, can enterprise dynamic capability play a mediating role between enterprise–user interaction and business model resilience? Thirdly, what role does knowledge-oriented leadership play in the above-mentioned influence mechanism? Starting from the three research questions of this study, we conduct questionnaire surveys through both online and offline methods, and comprehensively apply a variety of empirical methods. Using data from 300 enterprise questionnaires as a sample, we empirically test the relationships among enterprise–user interaction, enterprise dynamic capability, business model resilience, and knowledge-oriented leadership. The empirical results show that enterprise–user interaction has a positive impact on business model resilience; enterprise dynamic capability plays a partial mediating role in the process of influencing enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience; knowledge-oriented leadership plays a moderating role, positively moderating the relationship between enterprise–user interaction and enterprise dynamic capability, as well as the indirect effect of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience through enterprise dynamic capability. Specifically, enterprise–user interaction enables enterprises to acquire a large amount of rich user information and resources, thereby enhancing their ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external resources, namely enterprise dynamic capability. The improvement in enterprise dynamic capability, in turn, promotes the enhancement of business model resilience. In other words, enterprise dynamic capability serves as a mediating mechanism between enterprise–user interaction and business model resilience. Knowledge-oriented leadership, as a new-style leadership, acts as a moderating mechanism in the relationship between enterprise–user interaction and enterprise dynamic capability and its mediating role. Under the influence of a high-level knowledge-oriented leadership, both the relationship between enterprise–user interaction and enterprise dynamic capability and the indirect effect of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience through enterprise dynamic capability are strengthened. This empirical result not only answers the research questions of this study, but also, from an academic perspective, offers practical guidance to enterprises on how to effectively enhance business model resilience through enterprise–user interaction.
5.2. Theoretical Contributions
Firstly, this study, from the perspective of multi-agent interaction between enterprises and users, explored the influence mechanism of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience and conducted empirical tests, which is conducive to promoting research on the antecedents of business model resilience. Existing research suggests that the influencing factors of business model resilience can be classified into three aspects: individual, organizational, and external environment [
17]. For instance, Niemimaa et al. posited that unexpected external environmental events can impact and disrupt the business model resilience of enterprises [
5]. Regrettably, few studies have probed into the influence of the relationship between individuals and organizations on business model resilience. Even if there are such studies, they mostly adopt qualitative research methods. This blurs the theoretical explanation and testing of enterprise–user interaction, weakening the internal mechanism of enterprise–user interaction and reducing its universality. In view of this, this study took the perspective of multi-agent interaction between enterprises and users to explore the influence mechanism of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience and carried out empirical verification. The study found that enterprise–user interaction can bring diverse user knowledge and resources to enterprises, thereby helping enterprises continuously optimize the underlying logic of the business model and ultimately enhance business model resilience. This research result expands the findings of Li H.L. and Wang B.C. et al. from the empirical perspective of the interaction relationship between individuals and organizations rather than the construction perspective [
2,
20], further enriching the research on the antecedents of business model resilience.
Secondly, based on the dynamic capability theory, this study examined the mediating role of enterprise dynamic capability in the process of how enterprise–user interaction affects business model resilience. This not only deepens the explanatory power of the dynamic capability theory in the research of business model resilience, but also empirically explores the source of enterprise dynamic capability. Scholars such as Teece and Pisano believe that exploring the source of enterprise dynamic capability and how to improve them are important issues in management research [
7,
32]. Reviewing existing research, organizational resources are regarded as an important source of enterprise dynamic capability [
43]. Dentoni et al., from the perspective of enterprise stakeholders, pointed out that, if an enterprise can interact effectively with its stakeholders, it can obtain more heterogeneous resources from the perspective of stakeholders and accurately perceive their needs, and then adjust the enterprise’s resource base and business processes, thereby improving enterprise dynamic capability [
44]. However, regrettably, as one of the most important stakeholders of an enterprise, few studies have started from the user perspective and used quantitative methods to explore how enterprises can obtain heterogeneous resources from the interaction with users and transform them into dynamic capability advantages. Based on this, this study, from the perspective of enterprise–user interaction, theoretically and empirically tested that the heterogeneous resources obtained through enterprise–user interaction help enterprises continuously update their resource base in the dynamic process and thus improve the enterprise’s dynamic capability. This conclusion actually expands the view of Dentoni et al. that the interaction process between enterprises and stakeholders helps enhance enterprise dynamic capability [
44], and enriches the impact of enterprise dynamic capability from the perspective of business model resilience. At the same time, the resource interaction mechanism between enterprises and users proposed in this study also plays a certain role in promoting the further development of relevant research on the dynamic capability theory.
5.3. Practical Implications
Firstly, enterprise–user interaction serves as a crucial mechanism for enhancing an enterprise’s business model resilience in the knowledge economy. In the context of management practice, enterprises are advised to recognize enterprise–user interaction as a pivotal strategy for enhancing business model resilience, given its significance in the contemporary business landscape. Enterprises should leverage diverse online and offline channels to deepen user engagement and ensure interaction quality and efficiency. Furthermore, enterprises should efficiently utilize the heterogeneous resources obtained from enterprise–user interaction according to their actual development status. By integrating these resources into the business model’s core logic, enterprises can construct a more flexible and resilient business model, thereby enhancing their adaptability to market changes. These resources should be treated as crucial elements for updating the underlying logic of the business model. In addition, enterprises should continuously adjust their business models and operating strategies in response to external environmental changes. This proactive approach helps reduce the interference and impact of sudden crisis events on the business model, thus maximizing the contribution of enterprise–user interaction to business model resilience.
Secondly, enterprise dynamic capability plays a mediating role in the impact of enterprise–user interaction on business model resilience. In a rapidly changing business environment, dynamic capability is the key capability that help enterprises form sustainable competitive advantages and ensure the efficient and continuous operation of their business models. Enterprise managers should attach great importance to the cultivation and enhancement of enterprise dynamic capability. In management practice, enterprises should maintain a high degree of sensitivity to external environmental changes and quickly acquire heterogeneous resources during the interaction with users. Subsequently, they should rapidly integrate and efficiently allocate internal and external resources based on their actual development status, thereby continuously updating and reconstructing the enterprise’s resource base. In the continuous interaction with users, the enterprise should also continuously upgrade its dynamic capability.
Thirdly, as a new-style leadership, knowledge-oriented leadership plays an important promoting role in the impact of enterprise–user interaction on enterprise dynamic capability and business model resilience. Enterprise leaders should deeply understand the core driving role of the integration and allocation of heterogeneous knowledge resources in improving enterprise dynamic capability and establishing and maintaining sustainable competitive advantages. In management practice, enterprise leaders should clearly express their recognition and emphasis on knowledge resources, regard heterogeneous knowledge resources as the core driving force for enterprise development, and create a favorable atmosphere within the organization to encourage employees to actively engage in the integration and allocation of heterogeneous knowledge resources. This can accelerate the rapid integration and efficient allocation of knowledge resources by the enterprise, so as to better exert the promoting effect of enterprise–user interaction on enterprise dynamic capability and business model resilience.
5.4. Limitations and Directions for Future Research
Firstly, the exploration of enterprise dynamic capability is rather general, lacking depth and refinement. The dimensions of enterprise dynamic capability have not been differentiated. Follow-up research, building upon our study, can further distinguish the different dimensions of enterprise dynamic capability and explore in more detail the mediating role of each dimension between enterprise–user interaction and business model resilience. Secondly, this study focused on the moderating role of knowledge-oriented leadership, a contemporary leadership paradigm, between enterprise–user interaction and enterprise dynamic capability, arguing that knowledge-oriented leadership can effectively accelerate the integration and allocation process of enterprise knowledge resources. However, beyond the moderating role of knowledge-oriented leadership, other mechanisms may significantly influence the integration and allocation of enterprise knowledge resources. In the future, from the perspective of enterprise organizational structure characteristics and other aspects, it is possible to explore the moderating effect of the integration and allocation of enterprise knowledge resources on external resource acquisition channels and enterprise dynamic capability. For example, a distributed organizational structure can better share knowledge resources, thus enriching and expanding the boundary conditions of the dynamic capability theory. Thirdly, constrained by research conditions, this study solely relied on questionnaires for data collection. Moreover, it failed to conduct a detailed classification of interviewees’ positions, functional roles, decision-making authority, and organizational departments. In the future, experimental methods can be adopted, or longitudinal tracking data can be obtained from multiple time points and multiple sources. Moreover, the specific positions of the interviewees should be further subdivided to reduce the impact of the subjective cognitive biases of the interviewees and further verify the relationships among various variables.