From Expert Discipline to Common Practice: A Vision and Research Agenda for Extending the Reach of Enterprise Modeling

The benefits of enterprise modeling (EM) and its contribution to organizational tasks are largely undisputed in business and information systems engineering. EM as a discipline has been around for several decades but is typically performed by a limited number of people in organizations with an affinity to modeling. What is captured in models is only a fragment of what ought to be captured. Thus, this research note argues that EM is far from its maximum potential. Many people develop some kind of model in their local practice without thinking about it consciously. Exploiting the potential of this “grass roots modeling” could lead to groundbreaking innovations. The aim is to investigate integration of the established practices of modeling with local practices of creating and using model-like artifacts of relevance for the overall organization. The paper develops a vision for extending the reach of EM, identifies research areas contributing to the vision and proposes elements of a future research Agenda

LightCDD: a lightweight capability-driven development method for start-ups

Novice innovators and entrepreneurs face the risk of designing naive business models. In fact, lack of realism and failing to envision contextual constraints is one of the main threats to start-up success. Both the literature and the responses we gathered from experts in incubation confirm this problem. Capability Driven Development (CDD) is an integrated approach consisting of a method, tools, and best practices. It has proved to be successful when applied to mature enterprises that intend to become context-aware and adaptive. In this paper we report on the application of CDD to two start-up projects and how, despite being useful in making the entrepreneurs aware of dynamic business environments and constraints, a trade-off analysis showed that a simpler version of the method was necessary. Therefore, we present LightCDD, a context-aware enterprise modelling method that is tailored for business model generation. It reduces the set of modelling constructs and guidelines to facilitate its adoption by entrepreneurs, yet keeping it expressive enough for their purposes and, at the same time, compatible with CDD methodology. We also discuss what implications this simplification has with regard to the CDD tool environment

Capability Support for Entrepreneurial Ventures

The chapter presents the use of capability design for start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures. Newly started companies typically need to sharpen their business idea. The use of capability thinking in some pilot cases turned out to be a useful and beneficial approach. As a result, we distilled Capability-Driven Development and tuned it for start-up design, resulting in the LightCDD method. The method has evolved as we have applied it and learned from that experience. The chapter presents an updated version of the method, illustrating its results. It also discusses its perceived benefits and drawbacks. All in all, the results so far have shown that LightCDD helps in reducing the ambiguity of business plans and in identifying what contextual factors could affect the value proposition or the performance of the start-up