Mission Model Canvas

Mission Model Canvas

The Mission Model Canvas was adapted from the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder and Steve Blank for organisational entities whose primary goal is not to earn money but fulfill a mission instead – in other words: the key metric of sucess is not revenue according to Canvanizer.

Steve Blank states that the Business Model Canvas has served all of us well in thinking about building businesses – and therein lies the problem. In a business the aim is to earn more money than you spend. What if you’re a government or a military organization or part of the intelligence community? In these cases you don’t earn money, but you mobilize resources and a budget to solve a particular problem and create value for a set of beneficiaries (customers, support organizations, warfighters, Congress, the country, etc.)

For these organizations, the canvas box labeled Revenue Streams doesn’t make sense. In a mission-driven organization such as the defense and intelligence community, there is no revenue to measure. So the first step in building a canvas for mission-driven organizations is to change the Revenue Stream box in the canvas and come up with a counterpart that would provide a measure of success.

He’s calling this alternative Mission Achievement. And the Mission Model Canvas needs four more tweaks.

• Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries
• Cost Structure is changed to Mission Cost/Budget
• Channel is changed to Deployment
• Customer Relationships is changed to Buy-in/Support

There are many (many!) variations on the business model canvas, specifically for social entrepreneurs and mission-driven businesses. Anika Horn in the TDB Community says she have used the Mission Model Canvas. These are great resources and she highly recommend playing around with them to see which language works best for you. At the end of the day, you should be able to fill in any version of the canvas and arrive at the same conclusions.

The Mission Model Canvas is a great tool to help you sketch out your social enterprise idea. It evolves along with every round of testing and iteration your idea goes through – make sure to keep it up to date (post-its go along way!).

Checkout other business canvases in our Canvas Database