Tassilo Henike, Martin Kamprath, Katharina Hölzle

• Business model (BM) visualisations have become popular instruments with which to explain and manage today's complex business interactions. Using verbal and graphic elements, they provide simplified representations of reality and can support BM tasks that go beyond working memory's capacities. Visualisations thus reduce cognitive load and represent how practitioners and researchers think about BMs. However, they can also affect their thinking. This constitutes a thus far insufficiently explained tension between effectively reducing reality's complexity and the resulting cognitive biases. Building on cognitive load and framing theory, we qualitatively analysed 103 BM visualisations to explain how visual elements affect visualisations' cognitive effectiveness (helpfulness and ease of applicability) and unfold visual framing effects. By identifying five visual framing effects, we contribute to the cognitive BM perspective and explain how this set of cognitive factors affects BM management and research. We also found that most BMBusiness model (BM) visualisations have become popular instruments with which to explain and manage today's complex business interactions. Using verbal and graphic elements, they provide simplified representations of reality and can support BM tasks that go beyond working memory's capacities. Visualisations thus reduce cognitive load and represent how practitioners and researchers think about BMs. However, they can also affect their thinking. This constitutes a thus far insufficiently explained tension between effectively reducing reality's complexity and the resulting cognitive biases. Building on cognitive load and framing theory, we qualitatively analysed 103 BM visualisations to explain how visual elements affect visualisations' cognitive effectiveness (helpfulness and ease of applicability) and unfold visual framing effects. By identifying five visual framing effects, we contribute to the cognitive BM perspective and explain how this set of cognitive factors affects BM management and research. We also found that most BM visualisations are not cognitively effective because they consist of unclear and non-parsimonious elements, limiting their cross-contextual application. Furthermore, the analysis revealed certain visualisations with strictly operationalised BM dimensions. These findings provide essential contributions to the literature on BM methods. We conclude by discussing how practitioners and researchers can use BM visualisations and their cognitive impacts accordingly.…