Cognitive diversity in a firm’s top management team drives the locus of their collective attention and subsequently plays a defining role in organizational decision-making. Viewing organizations as systems of distributed attention, we investigate the influence of top management team (TMT) structural interdependence on the relationship between cognitive diversity and a firm’s choice of imitative or innovative business model innovation processes. Our analysis of 11-year panel data from the U.S. printing and publishing industry illustrates that TMT cognitive diversity promotes increased managerial orientation towards business model innovations that take into account market and industry specific factors resulting in innovative business model innovation (BMI), as opposed to imitative BMI. The results also show that cognitive diversity has a positive effect on a firm’s propensity to adopt a hybrid approach, engaging in both kinds of business model innovations simultaneously. The findings also show that TMT structural interdependence, resulting from a TMT’s structural hierarchy, functional structure, and reward co-dependence, enhance the positive effects of cognitive diversity, albeit in different ways.
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