bm ai
Design agencies generate a lot of knowledge — ideas from workshops, strategy decks, trend reports — but most of it ends up buried in folders or forgotten in 100-slide presentations.
At BMI, I explored how we could make this kind of internal knowledge easier to access and actually useful across teams.
Project details.
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2020
Year
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Business Models Inc. (NL)
Employer
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Lead business designer & project manager
Role
the challenge
At Business Models Inc., consultants rely on past research, strategy decks, and co-creation outputs to drive innovation with clients.
But with this knowledge scattered across folders and slide decks, valuable insights were often lost — leading to repeated work, slower project starts, and missed opportunities to reuse high-quality thinking.
The core challenge was clear:
how might we reduce time wasted searching for information, and turn scattered knowledge into a strategic asset?
the outcome
I designed an internal tool to help consultants quickly access and reuse strategic data — reducing inefficiencies and unlocking the value of past work.
As a ⭐️ bonus, the project uncovered a new client-facing opportunity:
the Business Model Innovation Tool, a paid subscription concept that turned BMI’s internal knowledge into a scalable product for prospect clients.
stakeholder interviews
I interviewed stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation. Some experts were scholars in the field of data science.
“Does any of you have useful information hidden somewhere in Dropbox that I could use to dive deeper into the competitive landscape of company X”
— Junior business designer at BMI
“The goal is to create ‘AHA’ moments in the client and help them discover the opportunities of innovating their business”
— Senior business designer at BMI
quantitative data
I gathered quantitative through several surveys. The goal was to better grasp what types of data the business designers at BMI used in the daily work.
To make sure the solutions truly addressed the agency’s challenges,
I took an agile, test-and-learn approach: delivering quick iterations of prototypes, gathering internal feedback, and adjusting the direction as new insights emerged.
This way of working allowed me to stay close to the real pain points, build alignment across teams, and ensure that every output was grounded in actual needs, not assumptions.
the approach
in 2020 this kind of solution seemed far fetched.
Today, with generative AI evolving fast, it’s exactly the kind of solution I believe teams will build into their own ways of working — like creating their own internal “wikipedias” for faster, smarter collaboration.
the roadmap ahead
I designed a phased roadmap to guide BMI from scattered knowledge assets to a scalable data-driven ecosystem — outlining what was needed to unlock value for both internal consultants and prospect clients.
