The Executive’s Playbook for Decision Model Innovation (Part 3)

Where Customer Centricity meets Decision Intelligence

Defining Decision Model Innovation (DMI) – A New Innovation Lens

Bringing it all together: Decision Model Innovation is the combination of Decision Intelligence and customer-centricity. More specifically, it’s an innovation approach that places the customer’s decision-making challenges at the core of the value proposition​. Instead of innovating just the product or service, you innovate the decision model – meaning the way your customer perceives, chooses, and uses solutions to achieve their goals. Doing so creates new value that is hard for competitors to replicate purely with product tweaks.

Let’s formalise a definition. We can say: Decision Model Innovation is designing new products, services, or business models that improve your customers’ decisions (through data, analytics, and insights), thereby differentiating your offering in a commoditised market. In other words, you leverage Decision Intelligence (data, models, frameworks, AI, algorithms) to deliver customer-centric decision support. Dr. Moser described it succinctly as “Decision Model Innovation = Decision Intelligence + Customer Centricity”​. It’s an approach that asks: how can our deep analytics and data capabilities be turned outward to help our customers make smarter choices? And how can that become our unique value?

Crucially, DMI is not about abandoning traditional innovation categories, but augmenting them with a new perspective. You can apply DMI through product innovation, process innovation, service innovation, or business model innovation – it’s not limited to one bucket​.

The difference is the focus. For example: