To sustain competitiveness in contemporary, fast-paced markets, organizations increasingly focus on innovating their business models to enhance current value propositions or to explore novel sources of value creation. However, business model innovation is a complex task, characterized by shifting characteristics in terms of uncertainty, data availability and its impact on decision making. To cope with such challenges, business model evaluation is advocated to make sense of novel business models and to support decision making. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are frequently used in business model evaluation to structure the performance assessment of these models and to evaluate their strategic implications, in turn aiding business model decision making. However, given the shifting characteristics of the innovation process, the application and effectiveness of KPIs depend significantly on how such KPIs are defined. The techniques proposed in the existing literature typically generate or use quantitatively oriented KPIs, which are not well-suited for the early phases of the business model innovation process. Therefore, following a design science research methodology, we have developed a novel method for defining business model KPIs, taking into account the characteristics of the innovation process, offering holistic support toward decision making. Building on theory on linguistic summarization, we use a set of structured templates to define qualitative KPIs that are suitable to support early-phase decision making. In addition, we show how these KPIs can be gradually quantified to support later phases of the innovation process. We have evaluated our method by applying it in two real-life business cases, interviewing 13 industry experts to assess its utility.

为了在当今快节奏的市场中保持竞争力，组织越来越注重创新业务模式，以增强当前的价值主张或探索新的价值创造来源。然而，商业模式创新是一项复杂的任务，其特点是在不确定性、数据可用性及其对决策的影响方面的特征不断变化。为了应对这些挑战，提倡商业模式评估以理解新的商业模式并支持决策制定。关键绩效指标 (KPI) 经常用于业务模型评估，以构建这些模型的绩效评估并评估其战略影响，进而帮助业务模型决策。然而，鉴于创新过程的变化特征，KPI 的应用和有效性在很大程度上取决于如何定义这些 KPI。现有文献中提出的技术通常会生成或使用面向数量的 KPI，这些 KPI 并不适合商业模式创新过程的早期阶段。因此，我们遵循设计科学研究方法论，开发了一种定义业务模型 KPI 的新方法，同时考虑到创新过程的特征，为决策制定提供整体支持。基于语言总结理论，我们使用一组结构化模板来定义适合支持早期决策的定性 KPI。此外，我们展示了如何逐步量化这些 KPI，以支持创新过程的后期阶段。