Designing a Business Game to Teach the Relationship Between Business Models and Business Processes

Abstract

Business models (BMs) and business processes (BPs) both represent key concepts for research and practice, especially for information systems (IS) education. Understanding how these concepts are related is crucial as they directly affect each other. However, no teaching concept focusing on this relationship can be found in the literature. Using a business game (BG) could be a suitable solution given its characteristics. Therefore, our goal is to design a BG to teach IS students the relationship between BMs and BPs. Toward this challenge, we follow a design science research approach to construct the BG. Based on the evaluation results of our first design cycle, we introduce a revised set of 14 design requirements and eight design principles guiding our design process. Besides, we demonstrate a revamped instantiation of the BG using a revised set of 24 design features. We also conduct two evaluation episodes comprising an experiment and confirmatory focus groups to assess the artifact's conceptualization and instantiation, proving its utility. Finally, we present a nascent design theory for BGs teaching the relationship between BMs and BPs. Our work contributes to the knowledge base on BG design in the domain of BMs and BPs.