Designing a Business Model Ideation Tool for Entrepreneurship Education

Promoting business model ideation skills is imperative in contemporary entrepreneurship education and beyond. Emerging (software-based) tooling for such innovations, however, often neglects the unique characteristics faced for educational purposes. To address this, we designed a novel artifact for teaching business model ideation in digital learning environments. By drawing on knowledge from pattern-based innovation, creativity, and conversational AI, we implemented a personal ideation companion (PICO). Our companion navigates students through five ideation phases, encouraging them to ideate business models in a divergent-convergent thinking style. The web-based tool covers diverse features on an educational, social, and motivational layer to teach business model basics and to promote creativity and versatile thinking along the ideation process. Based on our multi-year DSR project, we report on a situational instantiation and provide abstracted guidelines for its design and implementation in (entrepreneurship) education, which has been evaluated in several formal and informal learning scenarios.