The Business Model Canvas

Every new intrapreneur or entrepreneur with an idea seeks to bring his creation to life and watch it grow over time. Successful growth over time needs sustainability, a key factor for enduring ideas. The most common way of communicating a sustainable proposition for a new idea is the business plan.

A business plan outlines a problem, the opportunity it presents, an approach for solving it, a model for generating revenues, ways for managing costs, and levers for growth over time.

There are two stages to writing a business plan. The first stage is actually writing the plan, and the second is keeping it up to date as your business evolves.

Business plans are often written for pitch or fundraising purposes, then promptly forgotten afterwards. Investor attention would tend to gravitate around targets and the company's performance in the direction of these targets, without paying attention to core aspects of the business. However, a business plan performs many functions throughout the life of your business. It should be treated as a living document, and it should be maintained and updated as your business evolves.

In 2008, Alexander Osterwalder proposed a new format called the Business Model Canvas (BMC). The BMC is a single-page document that lets you represent all aspects of a business plan:

Let's break this down and go through each section of the canvas.