Abstract: With the rapid development of economy and accelerating of internationalization, rivalries among enterprises are no longer limited to the competition of products and services; and it is evolved into competitions among business model of enterprises. Selecting the most suitable business model promotes the growth of enterprises' profitability and it also has significance impact on enterprises' future development. Many well-known enterprises have already started business model innovation and business model redesign in order to gain competitive advantages over competitors. Many scholars also have started academic studies of business model selection and innovation from different disciplines. The earlier studies of business model are concerned with the definitions of business model, the composition components of business model and the evaluation of business model. Recently, academic research on business model selection has caused scholars' attention, many scholars made considerable contributions within this academic field. Although existing researches provide valuable ideas and thoughts, there still lack of operational business model selection framework which is practicable in the real business environment, and also there are few research findings in the view of the value chain. In addition, the existing theories and concept ignores the correlations among evaluation indexes in the business model selection process. Therefore, how to select the desirable business model for enterprise using the decision analysis method in quality and quantity is an important research topic. In this paper, a new business model selection method is proposed in the view of the value chain. First, the framework of selecting business model is given based on the value chain. According to the given framework, the factors and corresponding evaluation indexes with regard to business model are determined through the related literature review. Next, the factor option groups with regard to business model can be formed through the selections of different factors, and the feasible factor option groups are screened in accordance with the compatibility evaluations among factor options and the rules of generating candidate business models. Afterwards, the set of candidate business models is set up according to the screened factor option groups. Furthermore, based on the linguistic correlated information among evaluation indexes provided by experts, the weights concerning evaluation indexes are determined using the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method, and base on the linguistic evaluation information concerning candidate business models provided by experts, the desirable business model of enterprise is selected using the extended technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method proposed in this paper. Finally, a case study on the development of business model for BGR Company is given to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the business model selection method proposed in this paper. The proposed systematic approach of business model selection in the view of the value chain shows features of clarified concepts and simplified calculations. Considering the method usually requires the participation of many experts, it might be necessary to develop specialized software application package and decision support system (DSS) to process large amounts of assessment information in order to be more efficiently and effectively.

Key words: business model selection, value chain, evaluation index, DEMATEL, extended TOPSIS