Intelligent assistance system to support the digital transformation of business models

Artificial intelligence to develop innovative business model ideas

The ability to develop innovative business models for one's own products and services is of central importance for every company. At the same time, however, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular find it difficult to bring the abstract term "business model innovation" to life, i.e. to develop business model innovations in a targeted and systematic manner. This increases the risk that innovative products and services will not be marketed successfully - which in turn damages the competitiveness of companies and jeopardises jobs and social prosperity. This is precisely where this project comes in. In the Smart GM project, the SI-Lab at Paderborn University, the Kundisch, Hüllermeier and Wünderlich chairs and the companies myconsult, UNITY, WP Kemper and Fellowmind are working together in the SICP - Software Innovation Campus Paderborn on an assistance system that suggests suitable innovative business model ideas to its users. The basis for this is an extensive knowledge base on business models on the one hand and artificial intelligence on the other. The AI algorithms are designed to generate new ideas from the large number of possible combinations in a targeted manner. These are then evaluated on a public crowd platform as well as by customers and experts. As the number of evaluations increases, the quality of the assistance system's new business model proposals will also increase.

The Smart GM project is the first to combine expertise and methods from the fields of business model innovation, technology acceptance, machine learning, (crowd-based) evaluation of idea quality and computer-aided idea generation for the development of business model innovations, paving the way for a new generation of business model innovation methods - from passive support to active assistance.