Digitalization of an Educational Business Model Game

Krajger, Ines; Lux, Mathias; Schwarz, Erich J.

Entrepreneurship Education is an important field of entrepreneurship research and has become a part of many programs of business and engineering schools. Research also confirms that a new generation of learners, the generation of millennials, has emerged that shows a preference for interactive and experiential learning. Contemporary entrepreneurship education follows this approach by including a set of practices where students can explore concepts through personal experience. Educational games are a powerful tool to create such a learning environment. With the goal of investigating digitalization of business games, which are typically played in large groups and face to face, we particularly focus on the use case of the business model game called “inspire! build your business”. We give an overview on relevant comparable games, report on our approach for digitalization focusing on our use case, and we address the following research questions: How can the currently implemented game mechanics be improved and what needs to be considered when implementing a fully digital version of the game? We adopt an engineering-based approach, where we build an application for being tested in a heuristic evaluation. The results of our analysis provide motivation to continue the digitalization of our business model game.