A Business Modelling Framework for the Front End of Innovation. : Customising a Guiding Material for an Early Phase of the Innovation Process for a Swedish Fintech Company.

Abstract: The Swedish Fintech company that is subject to this thesis has proposed a process through which all new ideas should go through before entering the development funnel, called the ‘Proof-of-Concept-process’. Today, there exists no material that helps and guides the idea owner through one of the more extensive phases of that process. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a material for this phase. The material is developed through a literature review and qualitative interviews. The topics included in the literature review are: ‘Innovation’, ‘Uncertainty’, ‘Front End of Innovation’ and ‘Business Modelling’. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were performed separately with three out of four members of the top management team. Continuous discussions with the industrial supervisor facilitated the development of the framework. The result consists of two parts, (1) the results from the interviews with the management team which aims to lay the foundation for the requirement specification on which components the framework should contain, and (2) a framework for how business modelling can be done at this phase of the innovation process. The result is a material that uses the graphical branding of the company so that it can be treated as an internal document. An unbranded version of the result is presented in this thesis. The framework is presented together with a deeper analysis of the separate building blocks that form its structure, together with suggestions on techniques that aims to help the user of the material. We argue that the result is a business modelling framework that considers recommendations for how to handle the FEI, and that regards theory on business modelling as well as interviews with managers at the subject company to establish what techniques such a framework should include. Further, the result is based on a wide variety of literature and authors. Concluding, we argue that the result can be considered a bridge between two relatively young research areas ‘Front end of Innovation’ and ‘Business Modelling’ with its primary application at one specific company.