Abstract: With the in-depth implementation of China′s innovation-driven strategy, the pace of business model innovation of platform enterprises has been accelerating, resulting in huge economic benefits and social value. The typical business model innovation of platform enterprises in the digital economy era represented by Alibaba, Jingdong and Meituan was born. However, in recent years, many platform enterprises have lagged behind in business model innovation. The reason for this phenomenon is that platform enterprises have one-sided understanding of business models and fail to promote business model innovation effectively. Therefore, how to drive business model innovation has become an important issue for the sustainable growth of platform enterprises and the effective implementation of China′s digital economy strategy.The existing research on business model innovation of platform enterprises focuses on the two major themes of innovation antecedents and process. Foss and Luo pointed out in their research that innovation is a necessary and important proposition for the value creation of platform enterprises in the Internet era. On this basis, Feng described the modules of revenue model, value creation and factor support in the process of business model innovation from the perspective of space-time fit in the context of the Internet. Most of the existing studies are based on two perspectives of resources and opportunities to examine the influencing factors of business model innovation. Resource perspective research emphasizes the close relationship between data resources, complementary assets, redundant resources and management, resource orchestration and business model innovation. The opportunity perspective focuses on the impact of cross-border search and complementary market entry on business model innovation. To sum up, the existing studies still have the following three limitations: (1) The existing studies mainly examine the "net effect" between variables based on the assumption of linear relationship, which can′t explain the complex causal mechanism between multiple factors, nor can they meet the needs of current non-linear management. (2) Although the existing studies point out that opportunities and resources are closely related to the business model innovation of platform enterprises, most of them focus on the perspective of a single resource or opportunity, and discuss its impact on the business model innovation of platform enterprises from a single element level, ignoring the synergy of opportunities and resources. (3) In recent years, although strategic scholars have gradually paid attention to the impact of opportunity exploitation and resource co-development on business model innovation of different natures, such as efficiency and novelty of platform enterprises, and tried to explain it from the aspects of heterogeneous demand and cross-border operation in bilateral or multilateral markets, they still have not fully revealed the logic and effect of innovation, which needs to be further explored.In view of this, based on the concept of integration of opportunity and resources, this paper integrates five elements of opportunity exploitation and resource co-development to construct a business model innovation path model, and takes 193 platform enterprises as sample cases to investigate the complex causal mechanism by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method. The results show that the formation of business model innovation path of platform enterprises depends on the combination of elements at the level of opportunity exploitation and resource co-development, and the configuration of different elements at the level of opportunity exploitation and resource co-development forms two types of business model innovation path: Type 1 emphasizes the combination of imitative opportunity exploitation strategy and resource co-development strategy, while Type 2 emphasizes the combination of innovative opportunity exploitation strategy and resource co-development strategy; There are differences in the resource co-development modes of opportunity exploitation adaptation. Imitative opportunity exploitation matches well with resource sharing and resource orchestration, while innovative opportunity exploitation matches well with resource orchestration and resource extension. The conclusion of the study reveals multiple equivalent paths of business model innovation of platform enterprises, enriches the research on the antecedents of business model innovation, and provides theoretical guidance for the business model innovation practice of platform enterprises.

Key words: platform enterprise, qualitative comparative analysis, opportunity exploitation, resource co-development, business model innovation