While business model innovation is becoming mainstream in big corporations, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) still struggle to put it into practice. Knowledge on business model innovation in academia is rapidly increasing, and practical tools to make this knowledge accessible are becoming available too (e.g. Strategyzer, businessmakeover.eu). What is largely lacking, however, are educational resources for SMEs for learning about business model innovation and supporting tooling. Therefore, this study considers the development and evaluation of five Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on business model innovation for SMEs. The MOOCs were designed adhering to six design principles. The design principles were defined based on exploratory interviews with SMEs and a literature review on e-learning for SMEs, and supported a MOOC design that should be accessible to SMEs with different (educational) backgrounds. Evaluation of the design principles was done through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and showed that the MOOCS adhered to most of the design principles. This study has revealed that it is possible to transfer more complex theoretical concepts into a more practically oriented set of MOOCs by adhering to the six design principles. The design principles could be used by future researchers and practitioners who also want to make more theoretical concepts from academic research more accessible for more practically oriented learners, who sometimes have secondary education as highest level of education.
