A design method for data driven business models

Introduction The growing availability of data offers plenty of opportunities for data-driven innovation of business models. This certainly applies to interactive media companies. Interactive media companies are engaged in the development, provisioning, and exploitation of interactive media services and applications. Through the service interactions, they may collect large amounts of data which can be used to enhance applications or even define new propositions and business models. According to Lippell (2016), media companies can publish content in more sophisticated ways. They can build a deeper and more engaging customer relationship based on a deeper understanding of their users. Indeed, research from Weill & Woerner (2015) suggests that companies involved in the digital ecosystem that better understand their customers than their average competitor have significantly higher profit margins than their industry averages. Moreover, the same research suggests that businesses need to think more broadly about their position in the ecosystem. Open innovation and collaboration are essential for new growth, for example combining data within and across industries (Parmar et al., 2014). However, according to (Mathis and Köbler, 2016), these opportunities remain largely untapped as especially SMEs lack the knowledge and processes to translate data into attractive propositions and design viable data driven business models (DDBM). In this paper, we investigate how interactive media companies can structurally gain more insight and value from data and how they can develop DDBM. We define a DDBM as a business model relying on data as a key resource (Hartmann et al., 2016)