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Dear colleagues,

 

I have been following the discussion on Lean Startup vs. Business Plan discussion from about a month ago with great interest.

 

I would like to access the community with a question from the didactical perspective: "What are the typical issues students face when working with a business model canvas?" I would highly appreciate if you can share your thoughts or lead me to relevant publications. My interest at this moment is simply to become a better educator in LSM-based entrepreneurship courses, but maybe this can be taken further if there is enough interest.

 

I apologize if this is not the right forum for such a question, and hope for insightful responses.

 

Kind regards,

Rainer Harms

 

PD Dr. Rainer Harms · Assoc. Prof. · University of Twente · School of Management & Governance ·Dutch Institute for Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship (NIKOS) · PO Box 217 · 7500 AE Enschede · The Netherlands ·Ravelijn 2109 · Tel. +31 53 489 3907 · Fax +31 53 489 3919  email r.harms@utwente.nl · Personal Page http://www.utwente.nl/bms/nikos/staff/harms/

 

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Here's some research, reflection, and opinion...

In a cluster analysis of about 300 teams in a cleantech incubator program, teams that focused their hypotheses in the Customers, Value Props, and Channel portions of the Canvas did 3 times better than teams that diluted their focus. The full article, based on a paper I gave at AOM last year, is under review right now. LMK via direct email if you'd like to see a draft. I continue to conduct research in this area, because I fear that many "serious" academics view the Canvas as a pedestrian diagram. I see it as a controversial theory that is currently having major but mostly unexamined impact on an entire generation of entrepreneurs. I would welcome collaborators in this endeavor. 

In my own classroom, students often misinterpret the Key Resources and Key Activities components, believing that they contain the venture's assets (office space, desks, etc.) and tasks (hire a marketing team, etc.), respectively. Instead, at least from what I glean from Alexander Osterwalder's 2004 dissertation thesis where the seeds of the Canvas were born, he was trying to incorporate Barney's (and other's) Resource-Based View of the firm. And Key Activities may have referred to Amit and Zott's view of a business model as the description of an activity system that spans the boundaries of a single firm. At least, this is what I choose to believe, and how I teach the Canvas, because it allows for a deeper discussion.

Finally, I lament the Partnerships component. Too many students throw everything possible into it without much contemplation. I advise them to use it sparingly, not to deter emphasis on partnerships, but instead to trace the precise role of a partner. If the partner would help with Channel, and might provide Revenue, and might even impose some Costs, then I ask the students to put the partner's name in those three boxes, instead of sitting alone and unexplained in the Partners box.

There are several variants to the Business Model Canvas, some published widely (Lean Canvas by Maurya) and some not so (my own Social Venture Canvas, or a wonderfully detailed version from Yuwei Shi at Middlebury). And Mr. Osterwalder has added sub-Canvases that can be helpful. In short, it's still an evolving frontier!

With kind regards,