Business Modeling as Design Thinking: Implications for Entrepreneurship Education.

This article explores the notion of business models conceptualized as design forms, that is structured, coherent and attractive representations of future ventures. The content and structure of business models is genuinely discursive since they are built as narratives about potential desirable futures and shared in persuasive communication interactions and contexts. What may be the implications of this perspective on entrepreneurship education? What does it mean to prepare and train students in entrepreneurship to elaborate business models as design forms and to enable them to build structured, coherent and attractive discursive representations of their future ventures? Our premise here is that business models are generated, evaluated and negotiated according to aesthetical and rhetorical criteria. The aim of this conceptual paper is to explore the links between design, aesthetics and rhetoric in the development and evaluation of business models with the aim to elaborate a research program on business modeling training in the context of entrepreneurship education