Designing an ICT tool platform to support SME business model innovation: Results of a first design cycle

Business model innovation (BMI) is becoming increasingly relevant for enterprises as they are faced with profound changes like digitalization. While business model thinking in academia has advanced, practical tooling that supports business model innovation for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is still lacking. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate an online platform with ICT-enabled tooling that supports business model innovation by SMEs. Based on interviews with ten SMEs and SME helpers, we define requirements for the BMI tooling platform. The implemented platform offers downloadable tools, decision support for finding the proper tooling, and interactive features for building communities of SMEs. Evaluation through log data analysis and informal interviews shows that the platform is usable and provides a relevant overview of BMI tooling, although several improvements are still suggested. As next steps, we will (1) create prefilled tools and templates to speed up the process of BMI; (2) create educational videos on how to use the tooling; (3) define paths on how to move from one tool to another; and (4) enhance the community features on the platform. The paper contributes to understanding how academic conceptualizations of BMI can be transferred into practically valuable artefacts for SMEs.