Business Model Canvas Template
Determine and align your business priorities in a simple and visual way.
About the Business Model Canvas template
The Business Model Canvas template, designed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, provides a strategic and powerful way to understand your business. The Business Model Canvas contains nine blocks: fill in each one using stickies, links, hand drawings, pictures, and videos. Collaborate with your team to find a better way to explain and visualize your business.
Keep reading to learn more about the BMC template.
What is the Business Model Canvas (BMC)?
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic tool used for visually developing or displaying a business model. A BMC template helps determine and align the key business activities and their relationship to your value proposition.
5 benefits of using a business model canvas online
1. Provides a structure for ideation
The Business Model Canvas is extremely useful in structuring your business model visually. This helps at different stages of defining your business canvas template. Many find it easier to visualize a business model in one simplified view.
2. Focuses you on your value proposition
It can be easy to get distracted by all of the varying factors involved in running a business. The value proposition is at the heart of the entire Business Model Canvas template, so you can continually focus on the reason why your business exists. You should use your value proposition as a guiding star to give you direction as you fill out all other parts of the canvas.
3. Is fast to complete
Whether or not your business model is clearly defined or you are testing out different business models, the BMC template can be completed quickly and helps you generate new business ideas. This allows for quicker feedback, quicker ideation, and faster iteration.
4. Provides a holistic view of your business
With the Business Model Canvas, you can see how all of the elements of your business are interrelated and inform or affect each other. This provides you with a better understanding of how your business operates as a system or ecosystem.
5. Gives you a central document to share externally
Once you’ve filled out your Business Model Canvas, you can share it widely, get feedback, and make any needed updates. Because the visual presentation is easy to grasp and understand, teams, stakeholders, advisors, and partners should find the canvas to be relatively straightforward and easy to understand.
When do you create and use the Business Model Canvas template?
Business model canvases are not intended to serve in place of a business plan. Instead, the BMC template is used to summarize and visually illustrate the most important information of a business model, and to provide centralized ongoing clarity.
This canvas is appropriate for illustrating existing business models, regardless of if the business is new or not. The BMC template is also appropriate for visualizing new business models for startups, as it helps organize and consolidate ideas around your key functions. Keep in mind that the Business Model Canvas should be reviewed periodically, as all the factors listed can change over time.
How to create a business model canvas template: 9 key elements
The canvas provides you with nine key business elements to illustrate, summarize, and track. The 9 building blocks of a BMC template are:
1. Key partners
List the key partnerships your business leverages or relies upon for success. Include the resources or value your business gets from these partnerships.
2. Key activities
Summarize the key activities that allow your business to provide services and deliver on your value proposition.
3. Key resources
List the key resources your business relies upon or uses in order to operate and provide services.
4. Key propositions
Summarize the different value propositions that set your business apart from your competition.
5. Customer relationships
Define and describe the primary relationships you have with your customers, including how you interact with this, how these interactions differ among different types of customers, what different customer needs are, and the level of support the different customers receive.
6. Channels
Detail how your customers are reached, how your services are provided, your different distribution channels and how your value proposition is delivered.
7. Customer segments
Define the ideal customer personas your value proposition is intended to benefit, then describe the key differences between these segments and potential steps in the customer journey.
8. Cost structure
Identify the primary costs associated with operating your business and providing your services, then detail the relationship between these costs and other business functions.
9. Revenue streams
Describe how your business generates revenue through the delivery of your value proposition.
What is a business model canvas used for?
A business model canvas is a tool used to visually depict a business model. Business models are often very tedious and lengthy documents that are difficult to follow; a business model canvas allows you to create something more intuitive and engaging, while still covering all the topics you need to cover.
How do you create a business model canvas?
There are 9 key components to a business model canvas that you need to spell out: start with the key partners, activities, resources and propositions that define your business and will enable you to offer a product or service. Then, spell out the nature of your relationship with your customer base, along with customer segments and the channels with which you’ll reach them. Finally, spell out the cost structure and revenue streams of your business.
What should you include in a business model canvas or what are the areas of a business model?
You should include 9 key elements in your business canvas template: key partners, key activities, key resources, key propositions, customer relationships, channels, customer segments, cost structure and revenue streams.
Get started with this template right now.
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