Smart Business Modeler

Empowering management educators to teach, coach and guide the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Every year, billions of dollars and countless dreams are destroyed because entrepreneurs with a grand idea fail to set up a winning business model. The failure to create a sound business model is a ‘top 10 reason’ for startups to fail and the lack of experience in new business models accounts for 19% of disrupted industries, This is because a) setting up a business is an art and hard to teach and b) for an educator to provide state-of-the-art knowledge for various industries is challenging. The Smart Business Modeler (SBM) scratches that itch by providing any enterpreneurship educator with a unique business modelling, innovation and entrepreneurship platform, with cutting-edge, industry and context adjusted, content and tools that augment their teaching, and by creating an entrepreneurial community. The SBM is essentially an intelligent online tool box for educators and entrepreneurs. 

Why did we develop the SBM? In the context of entrepreneurship education at universities, in accelerators and in companies we noticed that students, founders or participants were often looking for a ‘business buddy’. While offline workshops or accelerators are great ways to offer this, often these are punctuated initiatives. The SBM is a methodological tool for online business modeling that provides online continuous IA (intelligence augmentation) based guidance, including holistic and personalized learning, building, transforming and sharing options, for anyone anywhere.

The core idea of the Smart Business Modeler is to combine education, business modeling playbooks and time-tested pattern packs. Playbooks help to have a guided step-by-step approach and are particularly useful for entrepreneurs that lack a ‘business buddy’. The industry pattern databases are very useful to avoid cognitive biases and be aware of current market trends. Put in the hand of educators, the SBM empowers teachers to engage with (future) entrepreneurs in a far deeper, continues and value boosting way via customizable online courses, state-of-the art business model tools and interactive 

The SBM is currently in beta mode and has been tested, used, and further developed in collaboration with the MIT DesignX accelerator. The plan is to leave beta at the end of the summer and promote the SBM to entrepreneurship educators around the world. In its next development stages, the SBM will be complemented with a machine-learning based business model evaluation tool which is currently developed with the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab and the Smart City Innovation Lab. This will not only revolutionize the way ideas are developed, but also make pivoting a thing from the past.

The SBM combines latest technologies (e.g. machine-learning, augmented reality and natural language processing) with the state-of-the-art teaching and research in entrepreneurship. This involves context dependent entrepreneurial courses (e.g. from high-tech startups to street vendors) and latest research findings with regard to business model development based on patterns, playbooks and a science-based framework. 

We are now working on three elements:

• Virtual reality app: a mobile app which allows users to take a picture of their business model canvas and uses image recognition to translate that picture online to the SBM in order to further modify it – i.e. seamless integration, merging the physical and virtual world.
• Natural language module processing to indicate similar business models across the globe.
• Machine-learning based predictive model to determine success potential of business models and provide suggestions to which parts of the business model requires improvement.

We launched beta in January and plan to leave beta in August. We distinguish between technical goals and impact goals. Technically, we work on three development stages for the next 12 months. Stage 1 – integrate virtual reality app to seamlessly connect offline worksheets with the platform (until December 2018), Stage 2 – Natural Language Processing based quality wizard (until March 2019). Stage 3 – Predictive model to determine success potential (until June 2019). With regard to impact, our goal is to reach 42 educational entities (universities/accelerators) in the developed and developing world, which teach about 2000 entrepreneurs.

In 3-5 years we envision the SBM to transform the way educators teach, coach and guide entrepreneurs on creating and capturing more value from their ideas with sustainable and innovative business models. With the aim of reaching anyone in both the developed and developing world, the SBM will be providing supportive platforms and latest-research tools for every context and industry. By enabling remote teachers training, allowing for a personalized monitor of students, offering new opportunities for skills development and improving access to up-to-date courses, we strive to be a Blackboard Business Buddy for educators and entrepreneurs.

We will target our target customer via three channels:

• Customer 1 – Accelerators and Innovation Centers, via INBIA which has a network of 22.000 innovation centers around the world and agreed to promote SBM;
• Customer 2 – Universities, via conferences such as the Academy of Management which gathers every year 10.000 management professors from around the world, this year in Chicago in August 2018; 
• Customer 3 – Synergetic partnerships with Leadership Academies for inclusive business model innovation and social entrepreneurship education in disadvantaged communities (i.e. Alibaba Business School and Girl Move).

Currently about 500 users are using the SBM, including accelerators (e.g. the MIT Design X accelerator), universities (e.g. Tunis Business School), or companies (e.g. Grundfos). Educators were able to manage an entrepreneurial community in a personalized way, with cutting-edge content and tools; while entrepreneurs were able to learn and implement novel ways of creating and capturing more value for their idea.

Our market research shows that there are approximately 700 business schools and 1400 accelerators programs in the US and Europe together. In the next 12 months we plan that 2% will adopt the SmartBusinessModeler (equals 42 entities) including selected organizations in Africa. This will multiply to about 1,680 entrepreneurs that will be taught via the SBM (40 per entity in the next year). In three years we aim to widen our regional focus to the rest of the world with a strong emphasis on the developing world, planning to have 840 entities using the SBM (= 34k entrepreneurs).

Our team is in the unique position to combine entrepreneurial, educational and IT knowledge. The founder is an international leading expert on business model research, has 10 years of experience in teaching entrepreneurs on four continents, and started four companies himself. The dynamic team has a background in innovation management, UI/UX design, machine learning competences, and full-stack programming. Furthermore, we have collaborated with global enterprises, conducted international workshops and participate on ongoing research projects with leading universities and accelerators around the world.

The SmartBusinessModeler is using a Freemium business model. The basic version is free for anyone to use. In addition we provide premium accounts for organizations such as academic institutes or accelerators (including branding, tailor-made courses and custom-made functionality). What is more, we will add several additional paid services (e.g. bench-marking, surveys, evaluation) internally and via external partners. 

SBM is advancing inclusive and equitable quality education (SDG 4) while providing specific technology services, and contributing to support the optimization of urban systems, to create inclusive and sustainable cities (SDG 11).

We want to empower teachers, entrepreneurs, organizations and innovation accelerators through an inclusive IA enabled online business modelling tool that fosters lateral thinking, pushes implementation and builds successful business models that create and capture more shared value – for anyone, anywhere.

Solve is an excellent opportunity to gain exposure, find like-minded partners and seek funding to scale our solution and grow our impact in disadvantaged communities.

The key barriers for our solution relate to promotion, funding and time. We are at a crucial take-off point where building the right partnerships is essential to accelerate our work in terms of technological development and internationalization. Specifically, we need to further develop the machine learning algorithm, to translate the platform in more languages and to validate our impact in our target markets to then fully scale the SBM.

Joining this MIT-backed community is the perfect opportunity to realize customized partnerships, grow our exposure and accelerate our solution’s technological development, impact and scale.