Disclosing Business Model in the "Integrated Report": Evidence from European Early Adopters

The rising emphasis on the business model (BM) as a reportable element reflects the view it constitutes one of the key starting point for investors’ analysis. In spite of this, recent academic and professional studies describe current reporting on BM as “inadequate” advancing the most heated critics for the presence of a so-called “boilerplate” disclosure.The IASB has thus embarked on a new initiative with the International Integrated Reporting Council to promote BM disclosure by mean of a particular reporting format called “Integrated Report” (IR). An IR is as a clear and concise representation of how organization creates and sustains value, and BM constitutes a fundamental issue of disclosure. The paper aims to understand whether IR is apt to offer informative disclosure on firm’s BM. Drawing on previous studies on voluntary disclosure, the paper purposes a “framework of analysis” to assess the quality of BM disclosure with specific regards to extensiveness and spread of covered topics and to three specific language attributes: type of information (quantitative vs. non-quantitative), tone (positive vs. non positive) and time orientation (forward looking vs. non-forward looking). By performing an in-depth manual content analysis, we apply our “framework of analysis” to all the European early-adopters and we find that their BM disclosure is substantially informative. Our findings have relevant implications in corroborating the role of IR project in improving reporting on BM.