Enabling Smart Service Innovation in SMEs: The bi.smart Launchpad

In the era of digital transformation, organizations are leveraging digital technologies to innovate through smart services – utilizing sensor-generated data. Despite the rich methodological knowledge available, a significant adoption gap persists in smart service innovation, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) due to constraints in knowledge dissemination and resources. Addressing this challenge, we collaborated with five SMEs to develop a web application prototype, the “bi.smart Launchpad”, aimed at facilitating smart service innovation projects. This paper delineates the design requirements and features instantiated in the prototype, elaborates on its architecture and implementation, and presents the results of a quantitative evaluation. Our findings demonstrate the prototype’s potential to bridge the adoption gap, offering SMEs a practical and effective tool to overcome the challenges of smart service innovation.