Towards a Metamodel for Service-Oriented Value Creation

Abstract

Today, the economy, society and politics are confronted with multiple challenges regarding the future of value creation. These challenges are: The simultaneity of hyper-individualized demand patterns, global challenges such as climate change, food shortage or energy security as well as opportunities and risks through digitalization. Available and sustainable service offerings that create value-in-use are one way to develop solutions towards these challenges. Yet, due to the challenges, their design is characterized by high complexity and requires a new quality of collaboration in multi-responsible actor constellations. Thus, we pose the following research question: How can we succeed in supporting the invention, innovation, and reliable delivery of smart service offerings in complex service-product systems?Modelling is a well-known approach to reduce complexity and enforce understanding as well as innovation in socio-technical systems. As such, our approach aims at developing a formal mathematical model of service-oriented value creation. It allows to model and subsequently simulate new service-oriented and sustainable value creation configurations. It supports strategic management decisions like partner selection but also helps to identify operational design tasks of the system (e. g., interface compatibility).We draw on three concepts as a bases for our model about service oriented value creation:1.A Service has three dimensions: Potential, process and output/outcome2.Complex service-product-system appear, when digital smartness is added. Digital service-product-systems encompass four layers: Infrastructure respectively products and database, digital service, personal service and coordination in the system.3.Business Modelling is oriented in three dimensions: Value proposition (promis making), value creation (promis keeping) and value capture (producing value as well as splitting costs and benefits) Framed by these concepts we locate the space where service-oriented value creation can enfold. The methodological approach to generate the formal model from these concepts combines grounded theory and practice research. Theoretical literature review in the field of service-oriented value creation provides a deductive way to identify model elements and mathematical relationships between them. Practice research follows an inductive argumentation to tune the model towards real-world requirements and challenges (e. g., data availability). Thereby, it relies on discursive transdisciplinary workshop procedures to fuse both parts. The project consortium includes social scientists, industrial engineers and computer scientists. Companies from three industries are involved as practical partners with their service offers or innovation ideas: Services for local public transport in rural areas, services to promote transparency in project management in the construction industry and services to place additive manufacturing products as a service in medical markets.In our contribution to the Session we aim to share first results regarding the model. This encompasses: •The conception of the model on three levels: Meta Model, Domain Meta Model, Case Specific Model. The model elements their relationships and the reasoning behind them is explained.•The explanation of central computational functions as well as how modelling and simulation can aid in the design of service-oriented value networks.•First insights into the technical implementation and our planned open-source strategy.•Experiences with the transdisciplinary approach and outlook on next steps in the project.The ongoing research is funded under project number 02K20Z000 by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the program "Innovations for tomorrow's production, services and work" and supervised by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA).