Toward performance measurement systems based on business models

Emerging research calls for abandoning outdated performance measurement systems (PMSs) to emphasise the value chain of companies value creation. Business model (BM) concept can help to highlight this causal chain and reframing their PMSs. However, little is known about how BM information is entered and used in companies’ accounting information systems (AISs). In this study, we investigate whether companies enriched their AISs by institutionalising BM information, and how they can combine this information into their PMSs. We statistically test the coercive, mimetic, and normative forces influencing the institutionalisation of BM information and the changes in AISs through the content analysis of the corporate reports and websites of 86 listed firms. Our results show that firms adjusted their AISs to communicate BM information, so making their AISs suitable for replacing their traditional PMSs with new BM-based frameworks. Despite this change, we offer some reflections on whether and how this may happen in practice and how combining BM information can give rise to new cognitive and accounting frameworks to reshape PMSs. This study enriches the theory on the determinants of the institutionalisation of new corporate information. It highlights the cognitive effects in designing PMSs by advocating the need to consider the cognitive and psychological aspects in capturing and portraying value creation in synoptic tools.