I was invited to present a thought leader webinar as part of the The Big Idea competition. In this 40 minute webinar I introduce the Business Model Canvas and provide some guidance on how it can be used in a social enterprise context to quickly capture and prototype business model concepts so you can create experiments to test them – and your assumptions!
The Big Idea is a great initiative coordinated by The Big Issue – Australia’s longest standing and most significant social enterprise that delivers solutions to help homeless, marginalised and disadvantaged people to positively change their lives.
The Big Idea is a social enterprise planning competition between students at participating universities. The Big Idea invites students to develop a concept and business plan for a social enterprise that might become the next ‘Big Issue’.
The Big Idea gives university students access to social entrepreneurs, Australian ‘Thought Leaders’ and experts across a variety of business sectors, who provide guidance, advice and direction to help the students develop their ideas into business plans for viable social enterprise. Meet the people involved.
Webinar
The webinar was recorded and you can watch it on The Big Issue’s YouTube channel. If you just want to see the slides (without all the chatting!), they’re on SlideShare.
Resources
During the webinar I made reference to some resources I recommend.
- The Business Model Canvas (businessmodelgeneration.com) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Free to share and adapt. From the great book Business Model Generation – written by Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur.
- Business Model Innovation Matters has a series of great posts with examples of the Business Model Canvas for many businesses you’d be familiar with.
- The Value Proposition Canvas is a powerful tool to help craft your value proposition – from the creators of the Business Model Canvas
- Simplified Value Proposition Canvas by Peter J Thomson. I generally use this variation of the canvas because I feel it does a better job of focusing on building empathy.
- Experiment Board by Javelin.
- People to follow and read: Alex Osterwalder, Ash Maurya, Steve Blank & Eric Ries. Google them, read their stuff, watch their interviews. They’re the thought leaders in business model innovation and startups.
- Dynamic4 Good is our grant program for community projects, not-for-profit organisations and social enterprises focused on creating sustainable positive change.
- Value Machine/Jetpack for Changemakers. We help early stage social entrepreneurs identify and articulate their value proposition through human-centred design and lean startup principles.
We Can Help
At Dynamic4, we partner with our clients to design and build business, brand, product and service ideas. We work with startup founders, business owners and senior decision makers in large complex organisations. We apply human-centred design and lean startup principles to understand your organisation, the value you deliver and the people you deliver value to. We use these insights to drive our design of great solutions.
If you have a community project, not-for-profit organisation or social enterprise you’d like to have a chat about, please make contact and say hello.
