Business Model Trends
Awais Shafique, Anna-Julia Storch, Özgür Güzel, Patrick Tu, Tim Hermes
BUSINESS MODEL TRENDS Influences on Digital Companions in the Factory of the Future A business model describes how a company creates value by solving customers’ problems. In the classical sense, it refers to generating revenue by interacting with the outside world. However, in our understanding, business models can also exist within a company. Taking on that perspective, they are internal measures providing value by for example increasing efficiency or reducing costs. In the digital age, business model innovation has become increasingly important. Ingenious technologies and vast amounts of data have led to increased connectedness, transparency and quickly changing needs of emancipated consumers. As there are no longer any long-term certainties, it is essential to be adaptable. Keeping that in mind, business models are not abstract, static thought constructs. They are lively systems with sensually perceptible and evaluable characteristics. They are in constant movement, consume resources, develop, propagate, and react to external influences. As such living systems, they are subject to the laws of nature, particularly the “Laws of Evolution”, discovered, explained and proven in “The Origin of the Species” by one of the most important men of the last millennium - Charles Darwin [233].
Applied to this context, our living creatures or species are business models. There is a vast variety of diverse business models. However, only a few of them survive the process of natural selection. Contrary to common believe, those are not the ones which are the strongest or most established. They are the ones which have adapted best to their surroundings. Often however, once companies recognize the changed environmental conditions, it is too late to adapt their business model. This underlines the necessity to be vigilant and anticipate upcoming trends.
machine downtime in the factory of the future. Third, servitization results in a shift from selling traditional products to providing fully integrated product-service systems that are empowered by new technologies. Fourth, knowledge crowdsourcing refers to the generation, storage, and usage of internal knowledge as well as outsourcing innovation processes to the external environment. Finally, digital platforms are adopted in an industrial B2B context and provide manufacturers the opportunity to connect demand and supply within the organization and beyond.
In the following, we will discuss five business model trends we consider as particularly important in the context of “Digital Companions in the Factory of the Future”. The paradigm-shift to a data-driven world enables opportunities to create value inside and outside of the organization. First, in the digital world, factories generate more and more data as a byproduct. The increasing stream of data can be monetized by selling and granting access to raw or processed data and identifying institutions that benefit from that data. Second, using data internally by leveraging predictive analytics capabilities can enhance operational efficiency and decrease
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