Business Model Canvas Template

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 (BMC) displays a business model, and it contains nine blocks: fill in each one using stickies, links, sketches, pictures, and videos. Use this business model template collaboratively with your team to clearly explain and visualize your business.

The BMC is a strategic tool used for visually developing or displaying a business model. Filling in a BMC template helps determine and align the key business activities and their relationship to your value proposition.

5 Benefits of creating a Business Model Canvas online

Filling in the BMC template makes it easy to visually and collaboratively outline the core aspects of your business's unique value proposition. Here are a few benefits of using the template:

1. Provides a structure for ideation

The Business Model Canvas is extremely useful for structuring your business model visually. This helps at different stages of defining your business canvas and makes it easy to keep up-to-date as strategies shift.

2. Focuses you on your value proposition

It can be easy to get distracted by 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 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. Fast to complete

Whether or not your business model is clearly defined or you are testing out different business models, the Business Canvas 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 BMC, 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 template, 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 relatively straightforward and easy to understand.

How to use a Business Model Canvas template: 9 key elements

The canvas provides nine key business elements to illustrate, summarize, and track. The nine 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 them, 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.

When do you 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 whether the business is new. The Business Model 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.