Extending Business Model Development Tools with Consolidated Expert Knowledge

Abstract

Business Model Innovation (BMI) is a creative process that often needs collaboration between different stakeholders with the support of domain experts. Instead of innovation workshops where the domain experts need to be physically present, software-based tools allow reusing the knowledge of many domain experts independent of their actual presence. This reusing of expert knowledge, which improves the quality of the developed business models, is currently not supported by existing Business Model Development Tools (BMDTs). To address this shortcoming, we present an approach to support BMDTs with consolidated knowledge of different experts. In our approach, domain experts formalize their knowledge about business models for particular domains in expert models to make them useable within and transferable between different tools. Business developers can subsequently choose the expert models they need, consolidate the knowledge, and use it within the BMI process. With this approach, we provide a three-fold contribution to the research of BMDTs: First, we design a modeling language to store the business model knowledge of individual experts. Second, we develop a concept to consolidate expert knowledge and detect possible knowledge conflicts. Third, we provide blueprints to add expert knowledge into existing BMDTs. We demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach with an open-source BMDT implementation and show the applicability with an exemplary instantiation of a local event platform.