Texts as tools to support innovation: Using the Business Model Canvas to teach engineering entrepreneurs about audiences

According to activity theory research, texts have the ability to act as tools that mediate classroom activities. In order to understand the teaching potential of one such text, the Business Model Canvas, we explore how the canvas operates in an entrepreneurship classroom. In doing so, we draw on the activity theory literature and data from an entrepreneurship education case study. The case study followed a course offered primarily to upper-level and graduate engineering students and includes observation, reflection, and autoethnographic data regarding how students and instructors used the canvas. The findings explore the ways in which the canvas, as a mediating textual artifact, served to anchor the students´ work in the needs of their audiences, consistently bringing them back not only to questions of who the users of their products will be and what those users want, but to questions about who they need to pitch their product ideas to and how the data they gather can support that pitch. At the same time, the findings illuminate the limitations of the visual/textual tool, and consider what is left out of the canvas and how those omissions might also shape students´ work.