Capability-based Planning of Digital Innovations in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises

The planning of digital innovations is a particular challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main reason for this is their resource limitation, which meets the increasing complexity of digitization. This means that SMEs have to face shortened product life cycles, deep customer integration into their value chain (co-creation) as well as challenges in the interaction between humans and technical systems with a lack of know-how and funds. Existing planning approaches for innovations do not meet the resulting requirements. Thus, this paper presents a new capability-based approach to plan digital innovations in SMEs. First, the existing approaches are examined. Subsequently, business capabilities are examined in more detail and a methodology for defining capabilities in digital innovation projects is presented. Finally, the approach is validated within the context of an innovation project in assembly.