D7.10 Integrated Business Model Decision System

A public report, led by Fraunhofer, documenting the Integrated Business Model Decision System
 

This deliverable aims to develop a Business Model Decision System that supports decision makers at identifying and understanding COMPOSITION’s benefits for their business model and facilitates the task of mapping pilot partner use cases to their own company.

Thus, the results can be used by the pilot partners in COMPOSITION to further develop and improve their business models, and for future marketing purposes of the COMPOSITION platform, for instance to attract additional companies that may join the platform’s network.

Within the process of engaging new companies with COMPOSITION solutions and the network, the Business Model Decision System can play a critical role as the link between initial contact and identifying the right solutions for a company.

From a theoretical perspective, the deliverable adds knowledge to prescriptive knowledge on business modelling and Business Model Innovation (BMI) by providing real world case studies for the application of two scientific sound methods, the Business Model Canvas (BMC) and the Business Model Navigator (BMN).

Both methods have been successfully implemented and applied to the pilot partners and their respective use case during the course of the project.

The results indicate three main findings.

(1) COMPOSITION use cases, which cover both COMPOSITION’s solutions as well as the project’s vision of a collaboration platform, improve and innovate the pilot partners’ business models in a meaningful manner.

(2) The use cases improve and innovate the pilot partners’ business models fundamentally different, by means of the targeted business model segments, depending on the type of pilot partner(technical or industrial).

(3) Both BMC and BMN can be used to facilitate analysing and predicting project effects on business models with in an international project in the context of industry 4.0.

The developed artefact of this deliverable, the Business Model Decision System, is presented as a framework that maps segments of a business model that a company wants to improve to fitting business model patterns that describe fundamental changes or enhancements to business models. The patterns in turn refer to COMPOSITION use cases and, thus, COMPOSITION solutions.

Hence, there are two main tasks to accomplish before building the framework.  

First, changes within the business models of the pilot partners need to be visualized and analysed regarding innovation and improvement. Second, these changes need to be compared to the patterns of the BMN to find similarities and fitting patterns that reflect most aspects of the changes.

To visualize the pilot partners’ business models the project partners from Fraunhofer FIT adopted the approach of Yin (2003) and conducted a case study for each pilot partner. Each case study was carried out by conducting interviews with experts of the pilot partners to visualize their business model as a BMC and mark changes within the business model, that occur as a consequence of being part of COMPOSITION.

A distinction was made between when these changes would occur and whether they could only be attributed to COMPOSITION. The visualized business models are being analysed towards their focus of improvements, by means of the targeted segments of the BMC.As the BMN is based on the concept of four questions of business models (Pigneur 2010), “who”, “what”, “how” and “how much”, the results of the business model analysis are being mapped to the four questions. Each question reflects a specific set of segments of the BMC.

Consequently, the result of the case studies is an aggregated analysis that reports on changes within the business models of the pilot partners structured along the four questions of business models. This analysis can then be used to compare changes within the business models to the patterns of the BMN to find patterns that target the same questions of business models as COMPOSITION. As this deliverable found multiple patterns that fit the general context of COMPOSITION, the use cases were being used as a reference to filter out the most fitting patterns.

These patterns build the basis for the Business Model Decision System as they enable a better understanding of innovation and improvement within COMPOSITION. Additionally, this deliverable reports on other noteworthy patterns that fit the context of COMPOSITION but not the specific use case that were implemented during the project. These patterns may help the pilot partners or a COMPOSITION platform provider in the future by pointing towards further potential use cases and COMPOSITION solutions.