Industrial Smart Services: Types of Smart Service Business Models in the Digitalized Agriculture

Abstract

Due to lack of experience of companies with digital business models, agricultural machinery manufacturers and agricultural service companies are facing a positioning problem in their ecosystem. Smart services are getting more important for these companies and they have issues to define a matching business model for their newly developed smart services. The lack of a framework for smart service business models makes it even harder for companies to successfully develop new services. This paper contributes to a better understanding of business models for smart services and establishes a common morphological framework to define different types of business models for smart services. Six types of business models of industrial smart services were identified during the research based, which was based on a literature review and interviews with leading experts in the field of smart services. The validation of the developed types and its practical application was carried out as part of the German research project Smart-Farming-World and its four developed use cases. This paper gives a detailed description of the application of the framework on the use case nPotato.