The Doing Good Business Game: Benefits and shortcomings in gamification of triple layered business model design and teaching

In recent years we have seen an expanding development of tools for incorporating sustainability in Business Models (BMs), to a large extend relying on Triple Bottom Line (TBL) thinking. A popular approach is the Triple Layered Business Model Canvas (TLBMC) by Joyce & Paquin (2016), expanding the original BMC to three BMC layers for PROFIT, PLANET and PEOPLE. As part of their work, they discuss horizontal coherence in each layer and vertical coherence as an alignment between the layers. This alignment is different from a simple summing up of bottom lines, but how businesses should work with their vertical coherence is not straightforward (Bruun & Kyhnau, 2024). The Doing Good Business Game by Kyhnau (2022), based on the TLBMC model and the Doing Good Business (DGB) framework by Bruun (2021), proves to be very suitable for development of the BMC in each layer and finding the horizontal coherence. However, experience has revealed shortcomings when it comes to determining the vertical coherence down through the BM layers. We therefore set out to develop a new process model; the Doing Good Business Diamond (DGBD) which crosses the TBL’s PROFIT, PLANET and PEOPLE with the DGB framework's three parameters VALUE Creation, GOVERNANCE and BEHAVIOUR into a tool that can be used to determine the vertical coherence. In the following we describe the DGBG tool and briefly the new DGBD process model and how the game and the model are interconnecting based on the DGB framework.