Towards increased business model comprehension – principles for an advanced business model tool

Business modelling is recognized as an important concept to make company strategies more explicit and to compare alternatives combined with their translation to the operational layer. Typically, busi-ness modelling is performed by a group of experts building on established frameworks like the Busi-ness Model Canvas. In a subsequent step, different stakeholders in a company should build upon and work with the defined business models, thus, comprehension is critical. However, this is challenging from a practical point of view and existing research has not addressed the issue of business model comprehension. In order to close this research gap and to increase users’ business model comprehen-sion, we propose an advanced business model tool and an experimental design in this research-in-progress paper. Following the design science approach, we derive a first set of meta-requirements and design principles and present an advanced business model tool instantiation. The presented tool should contribute to an increased business model comprehension by providing semantic relationships and extended business performance indicators. Finally, we present a set of testable hypotheses and the research design for an experimental tool evaluation. ... mehrWith this research we intend to provide a solu-tion to the problem of business model comprehension and contribute to the design knowledge base of business model tools.