A bird’s eye view with Business Model Canvasses

What is a Business Model Canvas?

A Business Model Canvas works as a template to develop new business models or document existing ones. Its visual nature makes it readily accessible — an at-a-glance overview that captures:

• your value proposition;
• resources;
• revenue streams and cost structures; and
• important customer information.

Below is an example of a Business Model Canvas template, to give you an idea of its visual nature while also demonstrating the degree of information it captures.

BMC Canvas.png

How can you benefit?

The Business Model Canvas is a great tool for brainstorming in a team environment or between customer and vendor. Its prompts will help you tease out what’s important in your business model and how different elements work together. It will also help you focus on, and refine, each area. In addition, Business Model Canvasses can be tailored to suit specific needs/projects.

In action

Salsa Digital recently used a tailored Business Model Canvas when working on a new information architecture (IA) for a client’s website. The Business Model Canvas gave us a strategic view of the client and its business landscape. This information was then fed back into the site’s IA.

This process is also a useful tool for our government clients, because it helps them to adhere to the Digital Transformation Agency’s Digital Service Standards, specifically number 1: Understand user needs.

A Business Model Canvas can get a bit messy (see below example!) but it’s a great brainstorming tool...and you can always make it pretty later.

More info

If you want to find out more about Business Model Canvasses, I recommend these links:

• Alex Osterwalder- inventor of the Business Model Canvas
• Business Model Canvas: A Simple Tool For Designing Innovative Business Models (Forbes)
• Strategyzer tools and resources

Hope you find Business Model Canvasses useful and enjoy using them...I do!

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