1 Conceptualizing Innovative Business Planning Frameworks to Improving New Venture Strategy Communication and Performance. A Preliminary Analysis of the “Dynamic Business Model Canvas” Federico Cosenz, PhD Assistant Professor of Business & Public Management University of Palermo Department of Political Sciences and International Relations federico.cosenz@unipa.it Abstract Business planning is a fundamental activity that start-up entrepreneurs are called to carry out in order to attract new investors, business angels, and venture capitalists, to subsidize a new business idea. The key-tool universally used to communicate a new venture strategy to these players, as well as to other stakeholders, is the business plan, i.e. a framework including the business idea description, the product(s), the market sector(s), the core-assets, the budget, the business sustainability and profitability, and so on. As such, a major success factor for drawing up a business plan is the capability to clearly and synthetically communicate the business strategy. Among the others, one of the most innovative and popular business plan scheme is the Business Model Canvas which frames the business formula according to a unique framework divided into different sections corresponding to the main elements related to the expected business development. The aim of this paper is to explore how System Dynamics modelling can be combined with Business Model Canvas to better communicate new venture strategies and, as a result, speed up the acquisition of subsidies and other sources of funding. To this end, after analysing the strengths and limitations of the Business Model Canvas, the paper illustrates and discusses an approach that combines such a framework with System Dynamics modelling, also through an empirical application to a real start-up company. This approach is here named Dynamic Business Model Canvas. Key-words: Business Plan, Business Model Canvas, System Dynamics Modelling, Dynamic Performance Management, Business Strategy, Start-up Firm, Case Study. 1. Introduction One of the first step that nascent entrepreneurs are generally called to perform to launch a new business venture consists in drawing up a Business Plan (BP). Most educational books in entrepreneurship field emphasise how BPs are necessary for a successful start- up of ventures that moves from the audience understanding of the business idea and its formula (Chwolka & Raith, 2012). To provide an estimation, approximately 10 million BPs are written each year, world-wide (Gumpert, 2002), and many universities engage in BP teaching, and some of the most prestigious ones conduct or endorse BP competitions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and MIT (Honig, 2004). Potential entrepreneurs that approach professional investors will most likely be required to write a BP (Brinckmann et al., 2010). Though the entrepreneurship field abounds with models and manuals recommending different BP formats, in general terms such a tool can be defined as a formal statement