Tangible Business Research

As collaborative business research brings together experts from academia and the business world, it is inherently cross-disciplinary. Uncovering common interests and establishing a shared language is an initial challenge. Tangible materials can have a surprising effect on collaboration as they propel the conversation from abstract arguments to concrete experiences. To start a collaboration, imagine challenging your collaborators to “build” their understanding of organization, business relations, value network, and market position using physical materials like building bricks, toy trains, or rolling marbles. Besides being fun, this provides several advantages over “dry” conversation: richness in detail, playful “talking with hands,” embodied empathy with partners, and concrete thought experiments. In this chapter, I demonstrate four techniques that use tangible material to challenge collaborators to explain their company’s business model in depth and further develop their understanding of it. Tangible business modeling shows its strength in innovation workshops (Chap. 6), in which researchers engage companies in business model renewal, organizational change, or business relation development. I also explain the research data types this method provides and the results they generate. Finally, I demonstrate changes that introducing tangible materials into business research might stimulate in the business organization.