The concept of Business Model Innovation (BMI) has become more and more influential in strategic management research over the last fifteen years and introduces the additional notion of innovation to Business Model (BM); BM is defined as “the design or architecture of the value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms” of a firm. It hereby raises a number of crucial theoretical and empirical questions: Does BMI only stem from the upper management, or may it also be developed at a lower managerial through CE process? Whereas drivers of BMI remain in current investigations within academic research, organizational practices such as Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) has increasingly been recognized as a legitimate path to level organizational performance through innovation. Indeed more and more companies rely on CE to remedy the shortcoming in their existing innovation processes. The aim of this paper is to explore how CE processes are designed in an established firm to experiment innovative business model. Based on the CE and BMI literatures, we analyze the empirical case of a french legacy airline that we anonymized under the name of Constellation using a qualitative single embedded case study design. The case of Constellation is an interesting example to use because the airline started to encourage practices such like CE to experiment BMI. We highlighted several conditions under which BMI is enabled thanks to CE process.
