How Digital Twins for Design Thinking Support Innovative Business Models

Abstract

Business models in the digital age capture value from innovation and deliver it to customers as an intelligent offering that answers their needs. The interaction with networks of stakeholders that transcend an organization’s borders and work in globally distributed teams is common, driving the need for innovative co-creation and collaboration approaches. In this context, the paper discusses the design phase of innovative business models based on a design thinking concept for physical co-creation and a digital twin concept applied to design thinking itself, as a means to enable collective intelligence. These two dimensions are interrelated and encompass the value of a storyboarding approach based on SAP Scenes using the Scene2Model tool. Transforming tangible artifacts into digital artifacts is a significant benefit for designing innovative business models with the added value of facilitating model dependency and further analysis of models through a specific flavour of digital twin supporting design thinking, as demonstrated by Scene2Model. The approach was evaluated during a workshop for personalized service delivery in the context of Japanese hospitality.