Mapping Value Creation
The Business Model / Case Canvas
Visualize and refine your business model with the Business Model / Case Canvas. This tool helps you break down key components, ensuring your organization’s value creation is both strategic and actionable.
What is the Business Model / Case Canvas?
The Business Model / Case Canvas is a powerful tool for visualizing and refining how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. Whether you’re designing a new business model or analyzing a specific project, such as the implementation of a data and AI strategy, this canvas provides a structured approach to understanding the key elements that drive success.
At its core, the canvas helps you break down and articulate the essential components of a business model, including who your users, buyers, and decision-makers are, what solutions you offer, and how these solutions generate benefits. It also examines the channels through which you reach customers, the resources and activities required, and the partnerships that support your operations. Additionally, the canvas allows you to assess the financial aspects of your business, including revenue streams, costs, and potential risks.
By mapping these elements, you can identify where data and analytics might strengthen an existing model or where entirely new data-driven opportunities could emerge. This canvas helps clarify the operationalization of strategy, guiding you to pinpoint which components need adjustment, investment, or innovation. Ultimately, it provides a transparent view of how each part of the business or project contributes to creating, delivering, and capturing value.
The The Business Model / Case Canvas is available for free under a Creative Commons license: You may use and modify the canvas as long as you cite Datentreiber in particular as the source.
When to Use the Business Model / Case Canvas?
The Business Model / Case Canvas is particularly useful in scenarios such as:
- Identifying Analytics & AI Use Cases Across Business Areas:
The canvas helps uncover opportunities where analytics and AI can enhance customer experiences, optimize operations, or create new revenue streams. By examining each aspect of the business model or business case, you can identify high-value use cases tailored to specific needs. - Designing Data-Driven Business Models:
Use the canvas to envision new data-driven products, services, or value propositions. Whether exploring subscription models, data brokerage, or AI-as-a-Service, the framework supports innovation while ensuring alignment with overall business goals. This applies to both company-wide business models and focused business cases for specific initiatives. - Evaluating the Feasibility of Data-Driven Initiatives:
Assess potential analytics and AI projects by visualizing their integration into the business case. For targeted projects, the canvas ensures that resources, customer needs, and revenue streams are balanced, providing a clear framework for validating financial and operational viability. - Transforming Existing Business Models or Business Cases:
The canvas allows you to explore how analytics and AI can improve existing business models on a macro level or refine specific business cases. From automating processes to enhancing decision-making, the tool drives targeted improvements in both strategic contexts. - Strategic Alignment and Ideation in Workshops:
During strategy sessions or workshops, use the canvas to foster cross-functional collaboration. It helps distinguish between overarching business models and specific business cases, ensuring that analytics and AI initiatives align with broader organizational objectives or project-specific goals.
By applying the Business Model / Case Canvas, you gain a versatile framework for analyzing and optimizing both holistic business strategies and individual data-driven initiatives, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities and market demands.
How Do I Use Business Model / Case Canvas?
Business Model
A business model outlines how an organization creates value by providing products and services (solutions) with specific benefits to its end users. These solutions are promoted and sold through marketing and sales channels to economic buyers and decision makers.
To achieve this, the company must:
- Maintain Customer Relationships
- Invest in Physical and Virtual Resources
- Perform Certain Activities or Outsource Activities to Service Providers
- Obtain Resources from Suppliers (Partnerships)
This process incurs costs and risks, but also generates revenues and other monetary benefits. Therefore, a business model is the operationalization of a business strategy.
A business model is considered successfully innovative if it is:
- Desired (yellow boxes on the right)
- Feasible (blue boxes on the left)
- Viable (green boxes on the bottom)
Business Case
A business case explains how an organization creates value from a specific project, such as the implementation of a data and AI strategy. It can be seen as a “small” business model that focuses on a specific domain of the company.
If a data and AI business strategy is designed to transform the entire company, the business case becomes the new business model.
In the context of a business case, solutions can include data and AI products for internal use. Here:
- End Users: Employees
- Economic Buyers: Sponsors
- Decision Makers: C-level Managers
Benefits are targeted at end users, while the incremental revenues and monetary advantages refer to the added value for the organization. Channels are internal communication and distribution channels, and relationships describe how the data and AI unit communicates and collaborates with the business units.
The Canvas Sections
1a Header
The header defines the content of the canvas and should consist of the following information:
- Designed for: Which organization (company, department, team, etc.) does the content of the canvas concern?
- Designed by: Which organization (company, department, team, etc.) created the content?
- Date: When was the content created or last updated?
- Focused on: On which area/topic/case/etc. does the content of this canvas focus?
There should be no copies of the same canvas with identical headers, i.e., the header clearly identifies a version of the canvas (copy) and documents the current status of its content.
2abc Users, Buyers, Decision Makers
• Users: Who uses and/or benefits from the solutions (i.e., products and services)?
• Buyers: Who pays for the solutions (e.g., in B2C businesses, parents for their kids)?
• Decision Makers: Who decides about the purchase (e.g., in B2B businesses, the managing director)?
The users, buyers, and decision makers are the customers. If the products and services are for professional or business use, the customers are called “clients.” In the context of personal use, they are called “consumers.”
② Users, Buyers, Decision Makers / Business Case
• Users: Who is using and/or benefiting from the solutions (e.g., data/AI products)?
• Buyers: Who provides the budget (e.g., the sponsor)?
• Decision Makers: Who makes the decisions about whether to make or buy the solutions?
Think of users, buyers, and decision makers as internal customers of your (data / AI) solutions. A user might be an internal employee, an external customer, or an employee of partner companies (e.g., suppliers, service providers). The user can be:
• End User: Interacts directly with the solution and benefits directly from it.
• Indirect User: Benefits indirectly from the solution or uses it to create benefits for someone else.
3a Solutions
Which solutions do we offer to our customers?
A solution refers to a product, service, or a combination of both that addresses a specific need or problem faced by a customer (see Users, Buyers, and Decision Makers).
③a) Solutions / Business Case
Which internal or external (especially data and AI) solutions do we provide to users (employees, customers, suppliers, etc.)?
A solution can be a software product, a human service, or a combination of both, designed to address a specific use case or a set of related use cases (see Analytics & AI Use Case canvas). When users aim to use data, analytics, and/or AI to solve their problems or answer their questions, this is referred to as a data-driven, analytical, and/or AI solution. Often, the solution is integrated into an end-user software application, which may also be called an analytical or AI application (see Analytics & AI Maturity canvas).
A data analytics or AI solution employs one or more data or AI products internally. A data/AI product is the result of applying analytics or machine learning to data (see Data Monetization canvas). Such a data/AI product might be reused in multiple solutions.
- Products: Software or human services.
- Data-Driven Solutions: For solving user problems or answering questions.
- Applications: Integrated into end-user software.
- Data/AI Products: Results of analytics or machine learning applied to data, reusable in multiple solutions.
3b Benefits
Which benefits do customers desire from our solutions?
Customer benefits can be classified into:
- Functional: Practical utility and performance.
- Emotional: Positive feelings and experiences.
- Social: Enhanced social status or connections.
- Economic: Cost savings or financial gains.
- Health: Improved physical or mental well-being.
If these benefits are unique to the solution and satisfy user needs, this is referred to as the “value proposition.”
③b) Benefits / Business Case
What are the desired benefits of our (data / AI) solutions?
User benefits describe how the solution helps a user achieve objectives and results, solve their pains, and realize their gains.
4 Channels
Through which channels do we advertise, sell, deliver, and support our solutions for customers?
Customer channels can be divided into:
- Marketing, Sales, Service, and Distribution Channels
- Online vs. Offline Channels
- Classic vs. Digital Channels
④ Channels / Business Case
How do we deliver and deploy our data and AI solutions to users, and how do users submit ad-hoc analysis, support, bug, change, or feature requests?
User channels are used to:
- Deliver Software Releases and Updates
- Provide Reports and Analysis
- Receive User Requests and Feedback
5 Relationships
How do we engage with our customers and how do they interact with us?
A customer relationship refers to the ongoing interactions and engagement between a business and its customers, aimed at increasing benefits for the customer and the customer lifetime value for the business.
⑤ Relationships / Business Case
How do we provide the solutions, and how do we communicate and collaborate with users?
A user relationship can be described in various dimensions:
- Self-Service vs. Expert Assistance: Is the solution self-service, or does it require expert assistance?
- Training and Support: Do users need initial training and/or ongoing support?
- Development Drivers: Is development driven by user requirements (pull) or developer ambitions (push)?
6 Resources
Which resources are needed to produce our products, perform our services, and market them?
Resources can be categorized as follows:
- Physical: Buildings, vehicles, machinery, equipment, inventory, etc.
- Intellectual: Patents, trademarks, copyrights, proprietary knowledge, trade secrets, etc.
- Financial: Cash, lines of credit, potential access to equity and debt financing, etc.
- Social: Relationships with partners, industry associations, government bodies, and other stakeholders.
- Digital: Software, hardware, data assets, machine learning models, etc.
- Natural: Land, water, wood, oil, minerals, agricultural products, etc.
⑥ Resources / Business Case
Which resources are needed for the design, development, and deployment of our analytics and AI solutions?
Potential resource categories for the implementation and operation of data and AI products include:
- Human Resources: Data and AI experts.
- Data: Data sources and data products.
- Tools: Analytics and AI tools.
- Infrastructure: Hardware and software infrastructure, etc.
7 Activities
Which activities are required to produce our products, perform our services, and market them?
Activities are a series of combined actions that lead to a specific result and are divided into two types:
- Primary Activities: Directly linked to the value chain of the business model, i.e., delivering the solutions, e.g., inbound & outbound logistics, production & development, marketing & sales.
- Support Activities: Enable and enhance the primary activities, i.e., improve their effectiveness and efficiency, e.g., human resources (HR), information technology (IT), business intelligence (BI).
Activities are linked into business processes, i.e., a sequence of decisions and actions.
⑦ Activities / Business Case
Which activities are required for the design, development, and deployment of our analytics and AI solutions?
Solutions require activities for:
- Implementation: Value-oriented and user-centric design, data exploration and analytical experimentation, data and AI modeling, data and software engineering, model and code evaluation, unit and performance testing, etc.
- Operation: (Continuous) delivery, integration, and deployment (CD/CI); data, model, and product management; data, model, and performance monitoring; support and training, etc. (See DevOps, DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps)
8 Partnerships
Which suppliers provide us with the required resources, and which service providers handle crucial activities for us?
- Suppliers: Provide necessary resources.
- Service Providers: Handle essential activities.
9 Revenues & Advantages
Which revenue sources do we tap by selling our products and services? Which other (monetary) trade-offs do we receive from our customers (for example, data as part of a data exchange)?
- Revenue Sources: Sales of products and services.
- Other (Monetary) Trade-offs: Data exchanges or other financial benefits from customers.
10 Cost & Risks
Which costs occur for us due to the resources, activities, and partnerships? Which risks of our business model do we need to consider?
- Costs: Expenses related to resources, activities, and partnerships.
- Risks: Potential risks associated with the business model.
11 Check
[Placeholder text for Check]
Where Can I Find More Information?
- Find detailed tutorials and examples on how to use the canvas in the context of designing a fully integrated data & AI strategy in our Data & AI Design Bench.
- Data Thinker-Gruppe (LinkedIn)
