Saturday, November 27, 2010

To what extent is the Business Model Canvas constraining? A Co-Creation Canvas example

The Business Model Canvas, as described in Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010), presents an easy and very general usable business model framework. However, a question that rises is will (should) each business model fit into this template? Is it sometimes required to innovate the template itself to describe or discover new business models?

An example that I used for experimenting with an alternative template is (service) co-creation. Simply stated, the idea of co-creation is that the separation between a producer and consumer becomes less strict. It is not the producer any more who is the only active party while the consumer is passive. This means that the consumer brings in resources and performs activities to create value together with the producer and has associated costs. To reflect this in the business model canvas, I adapted the template as shown in the figure below.

In a more general sense, we now work with a multi-level business model framework. At the higher level the core value logic is reflected in the specification of the template (for example, the template for co-creation in the figure below). At a lower level the value logic is reflected in the description in the template (which has not been added to the template in the figure below).

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