Assessing Business Model Disclosure in the Integrated Reporting

The rising emphasis on the business model (BM) as a reportable element reflects theview 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 IntegratedReporting Council to promote BM disclosure by mean of a particular reporting formatcalled “Integrated Report” (IR). An IR is as a clear and concise representation of howorganization creates and sustains value, and BM constitutes a fundamental issue ofdisclosure.The paper aims to understand whether IR is apt to offer informative disclosure on firm’sBM. Drawing on previous studies on voluntary disclosure, the paper purposes a“framework of analysis” to assess the quality of BM disclosure with specific regards toextensiveness 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 indepthmanual content analysis, we apply our “framework of analysis” to all theEuropean early-adopters and we find that their BM disclosure is substantiallyinformative. Our findings have relevant implications in corroborating the role of IRproject in improving reporting on BM