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Permalink Reply by Mike Lachapelle on November 30, 2012 at 7:12pm

Hi Alastair

I have worked with a few social enterprise startups and I am a mentor with the Ottawa Hub (part of the international Hub network for social entrepreneurship). Frankly I have never found the need for adapting the canvas. I use the tool as presented in the book. In fact the Hub has canvases on the walls in a number of places and makes personalized copies available to its members.

Where I do see challenges in working with social entrepreneurs is more along the lines of understand value creation from a sustainable business sense, and the need to validate your ideas with potential recipients, i.e. avoiding the trap of assuming a value proposition for which people are willing to pay. 

In the area of revenues, where it gets complicated is when there is a funding body. Often the entrepreneurs fail to realize they have to treat the funding body as a customer segment. They also fail to realized that, though the recipients of the product or services are not paying, the entrepreneur still has to capture a return value, in this case data - that is used to validate with the funding bodies that the organization is achieving the intended social impact. The startups need to design their business model to ensure they capture that data as part of their key activities. 

 

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Permalink Reply by Michael Joseph on December 9, 2012 at 2:05pm

Gentlemen,

Glad to read someone else brought this issue up. Mike, fully concur that redefining the value proposition is an area where the focus needs to be. 

One definition of social entrepreneurship is either a for-profit organization that creates social value, or a not-for- profit organization that becomes financially sustainable.

The issue is that if using the same canvas, it would lead to different definitions of value. One is focused on a social value, whereas the other has a financial value. Perhaps a business value proposition and social value proposition addition can resolve that issue and translation of the existing assets to serve one or the other.

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Permalink Reply by Florian Luedeke-Freund on December 15, 2012 at 12:27pm

“... these pages read like the beginning of a much longer conversation.” This is what I thought, too, when I tried to modify the forerunner canvas based on Alexander’s dissertation from 2004.

When approaching sustainable or social business, it must be recognized that normative requirements beyond business as usual change the BM in practice (e.g. when new governance principles are applied to supply chains). This is easy to understand. But does this change the general BM concept? And how can we add a social or ecological bottom line to it?

To assess the social or ecological performance, awareness of very different relationships between the BM elements is required. For example, the environmental impact of a value proposition must be evaluated throughout the canvas. It must be connected to the infrastructure and customer elements and be expressed in monetary terms. Therefore, totally different relationships and causalities within the canvas have to be conceptualized. We need to connect the canvas to concepts of environmental and social accounting!

For the moment I think that the canvas is able to represent sustainable or social businesses, but the relationships and causalities between the BM elements are changing dramatically if a green or social bottom line is to be evaluated.

I tried to catch these thoughts by means of “extension” and “inclusion,” leading to some kind of a “five pillar template” based on the so called sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC).

If you like, I can post or send the according discussion paper.

Best

Florian

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