Business model innovation of German VET service providers in international contexts – a longitudinal survey

ABSTRACT

To support German VET providers in their internationalisation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has created two funding programs ‘Vocational Training Export’ (BEX; 2010–2017) and ‘Internationalisation of Vocational Education’ (IBB; 2017–2022) for the development of international business models in VET. In this paper, innovations of the business models of the projects are analysed in order to find out the extent to which the innovations have occurred. The sample includes all funded projects (18), in which a minimum of one organisation was funded subsequently in both funding programs. The data includes project documents and qualitative interviews with project actors. In order to identify the business model innovativeness of the projects, a model by Taran, Boer, and Lindgren is used and extended by a further dimension (system) according to Bronfenbrenner and Kell. The data shows that nearly all projects innovate in several areas of the business model. While these are mainly incremental in nature in BEX, radical innovations dominate among the IBB projects. Among other things, it is also evident that the BEX projects with their innovations relate primarily to the meso level (institutions), while the IBB projects address more strongly the exo level (societal subsystems) with their novelties.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• business model
• international services
• vocational education providers
• VET
• vocational education and training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics statement

The respondents of the study have given an informed consent about the aims, the funding, the overall purpose of the research, the research methods and implications, and the anonymised publication of the data in the course of the present contribution.

Notes

1. The target countries were selected by the project actors themselves according to their expertise, strategic partnerships of the BMBF were funded to supplement the prevailing BMBF VET cooperations (BMBF 2017).

2. The term unit refers to the ‘actor(s) responsible for innovations’ (OECD and Eurostat 2018, 20), which in the case of this study are the projects of the funding lines.

3. For a definition of radical and incremental innovations, see also Gessler (2009), Gerpott (2005), Stummer, Günther and Köck (2008), Vahs and Burmester (2005).

4. Innovation projects are unique in their design and relatively novel (Gessler 2009), whereby the reference object (new for whom?) must be defined and thus there is usually a subjective novelty (see OECD and Eurostat 2018; Stummer, Günther, and Köck 2008). For a description of the three types of projects, see Gessler (2009, 30f).

5. For specific process flow models of business model innovation, see Bucherer (2010), Chesbrough (2007), Eurich et al. (2013), Grasl (2009), Gassmann, Frankeberger, and Csik (2013), and Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010), among others.

6. In the following, the seven buildings blocks according to Taran, Boer, and Lindgren (2015) are listed in relation to the nine BMC categories (in brackets) according to Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010): Value propositions (also value propositions), target customer (customer segments), customer relations (customer relationships; channels), value chain architecture (key activities; key resources), partner network (key partners), profit formula (revenue stream; cost structure). Only the category of core competences (description of the fundamental aspect of the business model that represents an advantage over other providers) is not included in the model of Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010). Since the business model approach was used in the course of the accompanying scientific research of IBB, it was also applied to the BEX projects in order to ensure comparability of the results.

7. The high number of analysed interim reports in IBB results from the design of the funding line.

8. No final reports were available for the projects B7, I8 and I9.

9. This data was not available for the BEX funding program as the scientific monitoring applied other methods for their research.

10. - = No information about possible changes available.

11. For projects B4 and B5, the demand in the target country was analysed at the beginning of the project. However, it should be noted that project B4 was not implemented in the further course of the funding period and project B5 was only continued partly, since one core part could not be realised by the responsible partner.

12. For project B4 (system), B5 (system) and B7 (reach) it was not possible to classify certain categories due to a lack of data.

13. For projects B7, I8 and I9, the classification of the fourth dimension could only be made with reservations, as no final report of the projects is available.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based on work conducted under the scientific accompanying research of the BMBF funding line ‘Internationalisation of Vocational Education and Training’ (IBB), funded by the German federal ministry of education and research (BMBF) under the grant number 01BE17013B.