Getting Started with the Canvas

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From the course by University of Virginia

Innovating with the Business Model Canvas

20 ratings

University of Virginia

Innovating with the Business Model Canvas

20 ratings

Have you ever gotten really excited about reading or writing a business plan? You might have started out excited, but I’m going to bet you didn’t stay that way. Let’s be honest- business plans are boring and mostly ignored. 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 In this course, you’ll learn key tools from the worlds of design thinking and Lean Startup to approach the Canvas with thoughtfulness, focus, and above all a test-driven approach to business model innovation.

From the lesson

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.

Getting Started with the Canvas2:25

Making the Canvas Work for You: Your Role4:41

Making the Canvas Work for You: Product Phase4:00

Meet Enable Quiz2:25

Creating a Testable Product/Market Fit5:48

Knowing Your Customer5:09

Getting to Know Your Customer Better: Think See Feel Do4:15

Knowing What Propositions to Test6:08

Creating Testable Propositions3:15

Testing Your Propositions8:04

Meet the Instructors

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

Now, I think it's a great idea to start sketching on

the canvas as you go through the course.

This is a practitioner sport,

not a theoretical item.

I would start with the PDF,

which you will find in the resources section.

Maybe print a few copies and just have it available to write on.

If you find that you want something digital that you can edit and share and so forth,

the Google slides version is also good,

which you'll find in the resources.

I thought I would briefly show you the mechanics of how that works.

Now, I'll start from the tutorial here,

and the template is in this section.

How do I get started? This link here goes to the downloadable template.

You will need to be logged in to Gmail or Google Docs, same thing,

to Google, to be able to make this copy but I will go here,

File, Make a copy.

I have not tested it but you can also download it as PowerPoint.

And what I'm going to do in this case,

is use Google Docs.

I go here, I make a name for my own file,

we'll call it A New Copy of the Business Model Canvas Template.

And now, I have my own copy that I can edit.

And what you'll notice here is there's a whole bunch

of slides which have different overlays on the canvas,

like this one is clean,

this one has this explanation of the three parts,

this one has various lines that you can manipulate in part.

If you want to create your own line,

the line type I used is here with line,

and this is a poly line.

So if you click and you hold down shift,

it'll stay straight for you and you can make your own line.

Now, here is the kind of non-obvious part about the whole thing.

If you want to change the actual canvas items,

this is on a master slide,

you need to go to here to View,

Master, and then, you'll see this slide and you can go in here,

and you can edit them.

And then, you just kind of click back out here and so you can see this is changed now.

And that's how you go in and edit the items on the canvas.

This is handy but I would, everything else being equal,

I would consider starting with a version you can just sketch on so you don't end

up fiddling around with this or anything would be on your computer,

switching between the course items and the canvas all the time.

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