Business Model Innovation Roadmap for the Digital Transformation Process of a German SME

Abstract

The domain of business model innovation has gained widespread attention during the last decade. This is partly due to the increasing inefficiency of only innovating products or services to stay ahead of competition. Companies must rethink their business models to outperform their competitors, especially in the digital age. New digital technologies might affect a business model, either as a threat or an opportunity. However, the task of business model innovation is resource intense and difficult to manage, and often companies do not know where to start and how the process unfolds. To date, little is known about how to correctly start this innovation process and how to manage a successful transition from an extant to a new business model. Roadmapping is a structured approach to analyzing an organization’s business environment for potentially disruptive changes. Traditionally termed technology roadmapping, the approach is used as a management tool for planning, forecasting and administration. More recently, firms have begun to apply the technique with a more general mindset to formulate business strategies for innovation that can address such disruptive changes. Overall, roadmapping is a future-oriented planning system and is thus used to derive specific activities. The main goal of this research is to offer a new perspective on business model innovation by adding the roadmap approach into the process and thus defining the transition path from a current to a desired business model. Especially nowadays, with the emergence of digital technologies, new business possibilities and opportunities have appeared. However, studies have found that particularly small and medium sized enterprises have difficulties completing the digital transformation. Therefore, the focus of the business model innovation roadmap is on the integration of the digital technologies into the business model for small- to medium-sized enterprises. The aim is to describe that approach and identify the overall architecture as well as the structure of the individual layers with their respective components. The business model innovation roadmap serves as a forecasting and planning approach that can assist an organization in identifying potential gaps and recognizing and acting on events that require a change of direction in the resource allocation. It aligns the digital technologies and the respective resources to the single business model components in order to gain sustainable competitive advantage over the different time horizons of small-, mid-, and long-term. In this study, in combination with the findings of existing literature, an approach for the business model innovation roadmap at the organizational level was developed. Validation by experts from the field of business model and business model innovation, and those with a roadmapping background was obtained through a Delphi survey. The overall BMI-R approach was then tested in a German small- to medium-sized enterprise via an action research component project. The theoretical implications of this dissertation advance academic research in the domain of business model innovation processes and provide a structured approach to organizations for a successful transition to a new desired business model.