Business model innovation is regarded already today as the major driver of value creation and growth. In a few years, it will be the main source of competitive advantage. The opening of markets and continuously accelerating global competition are leading to a situation in which competitive advantage based purely on product advantage will at best be only short-term. The way products are created, delivered, and maintained will make the greatest difference in the future. How companies do business will often be more important than what they do. Consequently, companies will have to continuously review and reconfigure their business models.

In the process of business model innovation, the challenge for companies is to balance stability and reliability with innovation and change. Without a systemic approach that ensure that all involved internal and external parties work ‘in concert’ to develop and implement one consistent business model that can leverage existing assets and that is aligned with the markets that won’t be possible. Business model innovation needs to be turned into a systematic process that enables organisations to execute it with operational excellence and to repeat it successfully again and again.

Organisations that start to think about to work on business model innovation and to institutionalize the process soon discover that they have to find new answers for a whole range of questions and have to struggle with many challenges. The intention of the European Business Model Innovation Forum, co-founded by Juergen H. Daum, is to leverage the collective intelligence and experience of a group of professionals – cross-company, cross-industry, and cross-country – to accelerate the process of developing a ‘best practice business model innovation process guideline’ and to facilitate learning and new insights that help the participating companies to successfully implement business model innovation in their organisations. Specifically this should enable them to avoid the cost of failure and implement change without jeopardizing the existing business, to create real differentiation and to beat competitors, to overcome resistance to change and increase speed, to boost productivity and reduce down time, and to measure the impact of change.