Business Model Canvas Workshop – BEAM meets NextX

On Tuesday October 12^th we students from the “Englischen Institut Heidelberg” had the opportunity to be part of a Busines Model Canvas Workshop in the “Gründerinstitut”. What is the “Business Model Canvas”? How do I build a StartUp and how do I start? These questions were answered on this fun day.

The first part of the day was about the StartUp NextX. Dan Seiler, Co-Founder from NextX, started with a little pitch about their business idea. For us students it was very interesting to hear how they try to solve with an app a problem that every student can relate to: What will I do after I finished highschool? The solution will be an application that will give students authentic insights into careers and courses of study in companies and universities. Also Sebastian Stark, the other Co-Founder, presented details about the designing and programming process for their app. To find more about the project of Dan Seiler and Sebastian Stark, click here.

The second part of the day was a “Business Model Canvas” Workshop offered by SAP Young Thinkers. Dan Seiler and Luisa Metzger, members of the SAP Young Thinkers team, presented the model and its different parts. The “Business Model Canvas” is a set of tools that visualizes existing business models and helps to create new ones. The concept was created by the Swiss entrepreneur Alexander Osterwalder, who wrote about it in the book “Business Model Generation”.

We students had already collected our own business ideas in small groups. Our mission was applying the model to our vision of a business idea and at the end we presented each other our business concepts. The model was not only an interesting visualization of a business concept but also of our potential future. It looked like this:

All in all it was a very educational, creative and inspiring workshop with lots of fun. Our mission for the future is to work on our business concepts and maybe implement our ideas.