Many innovative e-business ideas are hardly understood by their stakeholders when articulated just by words. To create a better, also shared, understanding, and to enhance confidence in the feasibility of such verbal ideas, we have developed a model-based e-business development approach called e³ -value . But does a model-based approach really contribute to the development of innovative e-business ideas? To answer this question, we report on an innovative e-business idea about online news provisioning which has been explored using our e³ -value approach, and which has been implemented afterwards. To see the merits of e³ -value we revisited this project one-year-and-a-half after its implementation. It then shows up that indeed a modeling approach contributes to e-business development, but also some important lessons can be learned to improve our methodology.