Business innovation using ontologies: entity - relationship graphs

Business Innovation Definition

Business innovation is the creation of substantial new value for customers and the company by, creatively, changing one or more dimensions of the business system (Sawhney et al., 2006). In other words, business innovation is the creation and adoption of something new that generates business value. This includes new products, services, or processes, such as integrated supply chain solutions (Sawhney et al., 2006).

Methodology to develop business innovations?

To develop new business innovations inside an organization we can define a process to introduce new ideas, workflow, methodologies, services or products.

In this post I want to share a simple user centered methodology to develop business innovations and know your opinion about it.

I've been working as Product Owner for several years developing digital products at InfoJobs (a Schibsted company) and I've learnt that a key point to innovate is to understand very well the user needs. 

In words of Ash Maurya, author of the Running Lean book:

Life Is Too Short To Build Something 

Nobody Wants 

In other words, the key point is to find a problem that matters. A that's not an easy task. It requires several points of views and roles in a team (User Experience, Business Developers, Product people, Customer care,...), skills like interviewing, observation, communication, ...

User Personas and User Journey Map

If we want to put the user at the center of the innovation process we need to work close with the professionals that have more knowledge of the user: User Experience professionals.

There are two common tools / output that the UX people produce in order to model a business and facilitate communication along the company:

• User Personas
• User Journey Map

User Personas

A persona is a rich description of a fictional person exemplifying a specific group of people such as your users or customers. They help us achieve empathy, create better ideas and challenge our assumptions regarding their needs and expectations.

User Journey Map

A User Journey Map shows the set of steps that a user follows along his relation with a service, product or a company to solve a need. 

The main idea is to show in a simple diagram the set of phases that a user does to solve a task or along the interaction with a service from the beginning to the end.

The User Journey Map, usually includes how the user feels (well o bad) at each phase of the journey, in order to identify product / business oportunities.

The User Journey is a good way to communicate and align teams that will work together to solve a problem that worths. 

If you have a running product or service, sometimes it doesn't covers the full user journey, so there're opportunities to extend the value chain of your product or service.

Something that usually happens is that every person that participates in the development of a digital product uses a different semantic for the same things, that means, different words to express the same meaning. When this happens the process to revolve the problem is a bit more difficult for missunderstandings, confussions, etc... between members.

The user journey is a good tool to enforce and align the semantic of the case between all the participants in the product development team, and the most important thing, aligned with the semantic used by the user.

User Journey Template from https://www.slideshare.net/demandmetric/customer-journey-map-26762239

Ontology: entity - relationship business model

As described in the wikipedia an Ontology is a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

From the user journey you can create an ontology that models the business identifying the entities and the relationships with them.

This task is easy, fast and funny to do :-)

At the beginning, it's not very important to complete all the model perfectly. This is a task that should be done in serveral iterations at the same time you get more knowledge of the problem / business. 

Below you can see an example of an Ontology or Entity - Relationship business model

To start an Ontology you don't need any more than a white sheet and a pen.

Entities

Some samples of entities can be:

• Type of users
• Organizations
• Applications / Systems or parts of them
• Results

Relationships

Usually, relationships are the interactions between entities. Relationships are verbs.

• Use
• Participate
• Generates
• Signs
• Buys
• Post

In some cases, an entity is part of another entity. So in this case the relationship declares this relation. Some examples are:

• Is part of
• Has

Below you can see an small sample:

Datification

After modeling the business with the entities and their relationships, the next step is the Datification. The main idea is to identify for every entity and relationship which information or atributes could define or could be associated with the entity.

The idea is to identify as much as possible. This part of the task can be funny if several people participate on it.

In this case,

Validation

The final result of the ontology is a graph: nodes and arrows between them. To complete and validate the ontology requires several iterations and involvement of several roles and people (users, product, business, UX, customer care, ...) in order to validate the ontology.

Depending of the size of the ontology, reading the graph can be difficult and also validate the ontology. To make this process easier I do that:

• Select one entity
• Show all the entities connected directly with the first entity and hide the rest
• Arrange presentation to make easier the understanding
• Based on the opinions of participants, create new entities, change the name of them, create new relationships or 

In this way is easier to validate step by step 

And how to innovate?

Once you have the ontology validated you can compare it with your product or service and:

• figure out about which entities or relationships you don't have implemented on your system. This is the first level of innovation: answer things that users do that are not implemented on your product / service
• introduce new entities or change relationships: if you are able to introduce some changes on entities and relationships you're changing your business, and this is business innovation.

Final thoughts

At this moment I'm building some tools to make easier the process of building an ontology collaborativelly with a group of people.

If the ontology stays in a drawer it is useless. It's important to engage the rest of people of the team.

User Journey Map references 

http://theuxreview.co.uk/user-journeys-beginners-guide/

https://uxmastery.com/how-to-create-a-customer-journey-map/

https://www.interactius.com/es/user-experience-es/metodologias-de-ux-user-journey-map/