Today’s business environment, being more dynamic and more complex than ever, requires innovation mechanisms that are not limited to the product, but which extend to the whole business model and thus facilitate to fundamentally enhance the customer value generated by product innovations. However, in successful and established companies the innovation of business models usually happens accidentally, in an unstructured way and primary at its periphery, because employees lack a common understanding as well as a profound basis of decision-making due to the complexity of this kind of innovations.
The running cooperation project “Functional Design of Business Models” between BMW Financial Services and the Institute for Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen focuses on the improvement of these two central aspects. The functional description of business models, so the modelling of essential entities and their interdependencies, empowers employees to gain the necessary sensitivity for business models, to simulate scenarios and anticipate innovation potentials and their effects.