The D-BEST Based Digital Innovation Hub Customer Journeys Analysis Method: A Pilot Case

Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) are ecosystems sustaining European enterprises to overcome innovation hurdles and push Europe as a world leading innovator in the Fourth Industrial Revolution context. They operate as a one-stop-shop, characterized by four main functionalities, i.e., test before invest, support to find investments, innovation ecosystem and networking, skills and training. These functionalities are addressed through the delivery of a set of services, grouped in the five macro-classes of services of the Data-driven Business-Ecosystem-Skills-Technology (D-BEST) model, a reference model able to configure the service portfolios of DIHs and to model collaborative networks in the I4.0 era. The model has been used in the DIH4CPS project to classify the extant service portfolios of the DIHs belonging to the network, to detect which new services should be provided in the future by the network of DIHs, and to identify opportunities for collaboration among DIHs fostering the creation of a pan-European DIH. However, to support an easier codification of such dynamics directly involving companies in the innovative DIHs ecosystems, a Customer Journey (CJ) analysis method has still to be built. This paper presents the D-BEST-based CJ analysis method, identifying typical digital transformation processes for the two main categories of customers of a DIH, Technology Users and Technology Providers.