Situation-specific Development of Business Models within Software Ecosystems

The development of new business models is essential for startups to become successful, as well as for established companies to explore new business opportunities. However, developing such business models is a challenging activity. On the one hand, various tasks of business model development methods (BMDMs) need to be performed. On the other hand, different decisions for the business models (BMs) need to be made. Both have to fit the changeable situation of the organization in which the business model is developed to reduce the risk of developing ineffective business models with low market penetration. Therefore, the BMDMs and the BMs must be developed situation-specific. In this thesis, we conduct a design science research study to design a novel approach for the situation-specific development of business models with three stages. In the first stage, we create a method repository with method fragments for the BMDMs and a canvas model repository with modeling fragments for the BMs. Both repositories are filled by the knowledge of domain experts. Out of these repositories, in the second stage, situation-specific BMDMs for developing situation-specific BMs are composed by a method engineer based on the changeable situation of the organization and enacted by a business developer. The business developer collaborates with other stakeholders during the enaction to create artifacts. Moreover, in the third stage, he receives IT support, provided by development support engineers, in different development steps.