Educating Engineering Students on Business Model Innovation

Abstract

The business model canvas (BMC) is broadly used in entrepreneurship education as a trusted, practical tool for mapping out a company’s business model. Although the BMC helps students to obtain a quick overview of business operations, in practice, entrepreneurs need to adapt and change their business operations constantly in order to grow and remain viable. These changes in a business model are represented by business model innovation (BMI), but frameworks that capture changes in operations are not well developed. Hence, there is a need to present the dynamics of business model innovation through a dynamic business model framework. In this paper, we followed the experiential learning approach and focused on teaching BMI through applying and analyzing BMI in real start-up cases. We applied a two-phase research design by first asking students to apply and analyze the BMI of real start-ups using both the current business model canvas and the proposed dynamic business model framework. Following their analyses, master’s students were administered a survey to assess the benefits of the proposed dynamic business model framework. The results show that the current business model canvas has limitations in capturing the dynamics of BMI, which can be addressed by our proposed dynamic business model framework. The proposed framework can improve students’ level of understanding of BMI and, in particular, its dynamic nature.