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The phenomenon of entrepreneurship is essential for economic development since the emergence of new companies instigates the generation of new jobs. In addition, entrepreneurship also generates a series of values that have an impact in the social sphere, such as social responsibility actions.
Entrepreneurship seeks to identify new business opportunities, where there is an incessant search for innovations, assuming calculated risks with the intention of obtaining profit, social recognition and growth in the market. According to Dornelas (2016), entrepreneurship means doing something new, different, changing the current situation and incessantly pursuing new business opportunities, focusing on innovation and value creation. In this sense, the entrepreneur must have vision and perception to identify business opportunities. Creativity, ambitions, independence and daring emerge as fundamental values to the motivation of entrepreneurial behavior (Kirkley, 2016).
The creation of a business plan is a key part of the entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneurs need to know how to plan their actions and outline the strategies for the creation or growing the company. A business plan is a document that describes the objectives of a business and what steps should be taken to achieve these objectives, reducing risks and uncertainties for the entrepreneur, company or investors (McKeever, 2016). Developing a business plan is also a great opportunity to know the project better and share the ideas of the promoter with his/her partners. The business plan must also be a document that accompanies the company throughout its life cycle, in order to define new strategies and to detect failures and errors during its development.
The process of creating a business plan is complex, since it involves technical knowledge of the business area and management knowledge. It also involves planning based on elements of great uncertainty and difficult to quantify. In addition, attracting investors to a business is a challenging process, because the business plan needs to be well written, credible and simultaneously ambitious. In addition, it is also recognized the difficulties of the traditional process of writing the executive summary by an entrepreneur, since it must meet all the points addressed in the business plan, but must be concise simultaneity (Jillek, 2016). Consequently, achieving both goals becomes a difficult task. Additionally, the analysis of an executive summary by an investigator is also sometimes complex, since the structure adopted by the entrepreneur is not always coherent and consistent. This situation can become critical and hamper the process of obtaining raising funds for the business, since it is essential that the executive summary creates interest among the audience (Baliga & Rodrigues, 2015; Nielsen et al., 2017). Therefore, we present an innovative framework that facilitates the process of building the executive summary, since this is a fundamental element of the business process, being the main element of analysis by potential investors and partners.
The proposed model is based on the canvas approach of building a business plan, and applies it to the executive summary section, having been defined for this purpose five building blocks. The model was later validated by a group of students of entrepreneurship classes, which allowed us to identify the perception of the advantages offered by this canvas approach. The article is organized as follows: we initially perform a revision of literature on canvas approaches to business models and the structure of a business plan. After that initial phase, we propose the Entrepreneurship Business Canvas Abstract (EBCA) framework and we exploit its adoption in the context of entrepreneurship classes. Then, we present the adopted methodology and we discuss the main results. Finally, the conclusions of this work are drawn.