Educating Engineer Students Business Models: Exploring a Proposed Framework to Capture Business Model Dynamics

Business model innovation and Business Model Canvas, as well-known business model architectures, have gradually become an essential topic in entrepreneurship education. The application of Business Model Canvas is considered an effective and reliable unit of analysis to measure companies business operations and performance. It helps students to first analyze the Business Model Canvas of an existing business and then create their own business idea. Although the Business Model Canvas helps students to get a quick view on the business operations through the creation, delivery and capture of value, in practice, entrepreneurs need to adapt and change their business operations constantly in order to grow and remain viable. Considering the need to capture the business dynamics in business model framework, the aim of this paper is to propose a dynamic business model framework as an alternative tool. Engineering students at Delft University of Technology were asked to critically assess the limitations of the existing business model canvas, and then students gave input and assessed an alternative dynamic business model. The results show that the current Business Model Canvas cannot capture the business model innovation of companies and the proposed framework improves student's understanding of business model innovation and in particular their dynamic nature.