The adoption of new digital technologies calls for a thorough understanding of the potential benefits such technologies may yield for end-users as well as the investments needed to support their realization in practice. To achieve this understanding and to help support decision making, in COMMECT, we use an approach based on collaborative business modeling to help clarify how and when such technologies can be fruitful for rural stakeholders. The resulting business models explain how connectivity solutions and their use cases can create value for rural end-users, and how these solutions can be realized through collective efforts of the rural ecosystem.

Why ‘Collaborative’ business models?

As modern value chains and ecosystems become increasingly interconnected, we see that new innovations call for collaboration and collective action to achieve large-scale impact. Through collaboration, organizations can bundle resources, exchange knowledge, make shared investments and achieve greater value to a wider audience. Ideally, when designing new business models, we intend to achieve a playing field in which such collaborations are fostered and can be ‘built-to-last’. Therefore, as part of our business modelling approach, we emphasize collaboration, looking at opportunities to create synergies between rural stakeholders and to (pro)actively address potential barriers and challenges towards collaboration.

How is it applied?

We conduct collaborative business modelling through a series of interactive workshops with stakeholders for the Living Labs in COMMECT. These workshops help to bring together stakeholders to foster joint decision making on new business models, ideate how value can be created for end-users, and help couple individual objectives of stakeholders towards collective impact. For these workshops, we use templates such as value networks, business model radars and business cases to help stakeholders in establishing collaborative business models for their connectivity-enabled use cases, looking at how value is shared between stakeholders and how shared investments can support these use cases in practice.

Expected outcomes

• Collaborative business models supporting the use cases of the Living Labs in COMMECT, explaining how (the ecosystem) of stakeholders can realize connectivity solutions in practice.
• Generalized insights on how connectivity solutions can create value in rural areas
• Common (shared) investment structures identified to provide connectivity to (low-income) rural stakeholders
• Opportunities for synergies and additional value creation between rural ecosystem stakeholders.

We can illustrate the application of collaborative business modelling by means of findings from LL Turkey. LL Turkey focuses on the development of connectivity solutions to support rural olive tree farmers. A major challenge for these farmers is the combatting of diseases and pests (such as the olive fly): poorly treated diseases and pests can severely affect the quality and yield of the olives produced, in turn negatively affecting the performance of farmers. Connectivity-enabled solutions such as weather stations and fly traps can help to address these challenges. However, it should be understood how these solutions can be offered to (often low-income) farmers and how investments should be made to ensure their long-term roll-out and adoption in practice. 

The results illustrate that through collaboration between farmer’s cooperatives and the local government, the solutions can be financed. Cooperatives benefit from their farmers performing well, and therefore are incentivized to finance the solutions on behalf of their farmers. On the other hand, local governments are keen on stimulating (high-quality) olive production and as such are willing to co-invest. We also observe that insurance providers are willing to further finance these solutions: if diseases can be avoided, less insurance payouts are needed. Therefore, the prevention of diseases also has significant benefits for the insurance providers, incentivizing them to support their roll-out in practice. 

Through this investment structure, the investment barrier for weather stations and olive fly traps can be significantly lowered. Both TurkCell (technology provider) and the agricultural olive institute (service provider) work together to ensure that the solutions are maintained and that advice on timely pesticide use can be given to rural olive tree farmers.

Contact Rick Gilsing rick.gilsing@tno.nl