Tool Support for Designing Innovative Sustainable Business Models

Successful innovation is the key to generate novel business model ideas. Current real-world challenges such as the deterioration of the natural environment require practitioners and academics alike to identify new ways of acting and behaving. Living the ‘virtues of German engineering’ in information systems research, we aim at supporting business model innovation and solving imminent challenges by developing purposeful IT artifacts. In this article, we report on three ongoing research projects and emerging software prototypes that assist business model innovation. First, to foster creativity during the development of new business model ideas and to increase rigorousness in Design Thinking, we implemented a prototype that enables a structured, traceable, and collaborative documentation of Design Thinking projects and recommends task-specific creativity techniques. Second, to support the construction and the analysis of business models, we present the GBM Editor that especially focuses on the reflection of sustainability. Third, to detail the business model, we illustrate the Cooperation Manager that allow planning service networks by focusing on inter-organizational tasks and information exchanges. For demonstrating the applicability and the dependencies of these tools, we draw on an illustrative scenario of electric vehicle battery second use.