Exploring Design Principles for Business Model Transformation Tools

Todays’ companies have to respond to fast-changing markets and new customer
demands to maintain their competitive standing. Therefore, business models must be able
to reply flexibly to new requirements and simultaneously their execution must be ensured.
However, existing business model concepts and tools are too rigid and often remain on a
rather abstract level. We present a research-in-progress design science project with the
aim of designing a business model configuration tool enabling higher executability. Based
on a comprehensive problem analysis and literature study, we derive a first set of metarequirements
and design principles. Additionally, we demonstrate a first prototypical
instantiation and demonstrate its feasibility in a case study. The presented tool enables
practitioners and theorists to observe and analyze changes in business models rapidly.
Furthermore, impacts of changes can be seen directly through the tools’ configuration
character. Finally, this research fosters cooperation between different company levels as
an imperative capability.