Innovating with the Business Model Canvas (Coursera)

The beauty of the one-page Business Model Canvas is that it drives meaningful focus. It helps us organize our ideas and have better discussions by forcing specificity and bringing linkages between key business drivers to the foreground. Innovation requires one hand being very focused on a fundamental need or problem while the other hand quickly tests different solutions. For this, the Business Model Canvas is very innovation friendly: It's a lot easier to tweak the model and try things with something that's sitting on a single page.

Course 4 of 4 in the Entrepreneurship: Growing Your Business Specialization
What You Will Learn

- How to create an explicit view of a company or product strategy in 20 minutes (with a little practice!)

- How to apply innovation tools from the worlds of design thinking and Lean Startup to your business model design

- How to use the Canvas to organize ideas and have better discussions by driving to specifics and linkages between key business drivers

- How to apply a test-driven approach to business model innovation

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Focusing for Profitability and Growth

How do you avoid the distractions that keep companies from innovating their way to organic growth? The best recipe is a hyper focus on finding product/market fit and scaling it. Fortunately, the Canvas is a great way to create that focus. We’ll start the course by looking at the jobs you do for customers and how your particular propositions drive revenue. We’ll also look at how you link those with focused customer journeys to keep these customer-centric linkages healthy and growing.

WEEK 2

How do you focus your capabilities and organization to maximize profitability?

How do you develop the team(s) and capabilities you need to find your next big thing? And then scale it before your competition catches up? This week, you’ll learn how to focus your capabilities and assets on delivering to the customer. In particular, we’ll look at three core business model types which have distinct implications for where you should focus your organization with regard to Key Activities, Key Resources, and Key Partners.