Business model innovation pathways: Digital transformation after disruption at The New York Times and The Washington Post

Digital technologies increasingly challenge firms by disrupting the complementary assets that support value capture—such as distribution and monetization channels. While the phenomenon of complementary-asset discontinuity has begun to attract scholarly attention, we still lack an understanding of the different business model innovation pathways incumbents can pursue in response, especially when adapting to specific types of discontinuous changes. We address these gaps through a comparative case analysis of the digital transformation of two leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2009 and 2021. Despite facing the same technological discontinuity, the two firms pursued very distinct pathways: The New York Times progressively moved toward a model characterized by “business-to-consumer knowledge leadership” by extending its editorial core into new consumer-facing offerings, whereas The Washington Post developed infrastructure-centric solutions, repositioning its model toward a “business-to-business technology leadership.” From these cases, we developed a process framework of two alternative business model innovation pathways that specifies the antecedents (strategic focus), mechanisms (asset reconfiguration), and outcomes (business model innovation) shaping divergent responses. The study advances the literatures on business model innovation, technological change, and complementary assets.