The Innovation Canvas in Entrepreneurship Education: Integrating Themes of Design, Value, and Market Success

Abstract

The innovation canvas represents a tool to incorporate entrepreneurial concepts in both entrepreneurship and engineering design courses. The canvas focuses attention on critical technical, market, resource, and execution issues that can determine the success of a new design or venture and inspires innovation by examining difficult challenges from multiple perspectives while encouraging the rapid association, revision, and alignment of critical themes. Further, the canvas serves as a communication tool for teams developing innovative products in an entrepreneurial environment. The design process is often presented as a sequential or structured process with the common understanding that, in practice, the process is anything but structured with iterative decisions and tradeoffs made among a variety of technical, production, and market issues. The canvas includes themes from both product design and systems engineering processes and merges them with themes from the popular Business Model Canvas from the entrepreneurship field. By focusing attention on key design and market themes, as opposed to process steps, the proposed canvas presents an innovation inspiring approach to developing designs that are more closely aligned with the realities and complexities of achieving success in an entrepreneurial context. In practice, a team interacts with a poster sized version of the canvas and populates it with Post-it® notes containing relevant information associated with each theme. The process is team oriented, engages all participants, and encourages communication through iterative development and the alignment of multiple themes across the canvas. For educators, the innovation canvas is a teaching tool for design and entrepreneurship courses that integrates technical and market content. In design courses, the canvas can improve product and service development by highlighting business and market considerations during the development process. In entrepreneurship courses, the canvas can improve business model generation by incorporating high-level design themes as integral components of the venture vision. As the canvas concept and associated tools are rapidly being adopted by practitioners, this work seeks to do the following: disseminate the prototype innovation canvas to a broader group of entrepreneurship educators, engineering educators, designers, and practitioners; encourage the canvas’s use; and obtain feedback on the canvas’s utility. The Innovation Canvas in Entrepreneurship Education: Integrating Themes of Design, Value, and Market Success