lean startup

It’s been more than a year since we introduced the Partnership Proposition Canvas as a prototype tool for modelling key business model partnerships. Since its introduction, we’ve been testing the tool and refining it. In this post we share the latest version, which has proven to be simple in use, and more effective in getting the conversation of business model innovation through partnerships going. Allow us to introduce the Partnership Canvas: an essential tool for designing, negotiating, and adapting partnerships. This tool works as an add-on to the business model canvas.

What, another canvas?!
The reason we’ve developed the partnership canvas is that many organisations struggle with their partnerships. One of the main causes is that there is no structured approach available yet to help design strategies for partnerships. Naturally, the partnership discussion itself between organisations is often veiled in mist. As Henry Chesbrough, the figurehead of open innovation, wrote:

“few companies in our experience take the time to articulate their own business model. Fewer have any clear idea about the business models of their external relationships.”

That is not a good basis for creating a collaboration. People leave too many assumptions about their partnerships unaddressed, and that backfires the moment they go live.

What is a partnership?
The first hurdle in the partnership discussion is definition of the term partnership. You won’t be able to define a partnership by only mapping out the two partnering business models. That describes the result of the partnership. It doesn’t explain how the partnership works.

A partnership is more. It is an entity that sits in between the two business models that make up the partnership. This entity enables value to flow between two partnering business models. By combining value inputs from both business models in a partnership, they are able to create new forms of value that they both benefit from. (I’ve written about what can best, and best not be defined as a partnership from a business model perspective in a previous post).

Value exchange between two business models

The partnership canvas was created to demystify the partnership entity by defining its building blocks. The tool can be used to map existing, and design new models for partnerships. The partnership canvas helps to break through the boundary of possibilities for innovating with only your own business model.

The building blocks of a partnership
The first question you need to ask yourself when orienting on a partnership is what will be the purpose of the partnership. The key to defining this purpose is to question yourself on how you can contribute to a better, more complete experience for your customer. This could relate to aspects of availability, convenience, speed, price, performance, etc.

Visual by Dave Gray

Based on definition of this purpose, you will be able to describe the missing element from your own business model, for which you are seeking a partner. You can use the definition of this element to screen candidate partners on a (set of )value(s) that you desire. This desired value makes for the first building block of your partnership design.

The second question is about your own contribution to the partnership. If you have identified what value you desire in a partner, then you need to develop a matching offer that connects with that value. A value offer is required, which is based on one or more elements from your own business model. An effective offer either complements or enhances the value you would desire from a partner. Only if this connection is made, do you have a basis for creating a relationship.

The third question demands clarification on how you will connect the desired and offered value. Through what collaboration activities or through what form will these values be connected? It is essential that both parties find a way to integrate the value that they are putting to the table. This transfer activity building block is the exchange by which synergy between the partnering business models is created.

With this third building block, an engine is created that enables value to flow between partners. But the partnership discussion doesn’t end there. Essentially what we’ve defined so far is a basis for connecting values. The ultimate question is whether this value engine enables you to create a new form of value that you can utilize to innovate in one of the building blocks of your business model. This question on created value makes up the fourth building block of the partnership.

Using the partnership canvas
Once you have mapped your business model, and desired value from a partner, you can use the partnership canvas to see how you can connect with a partner. The value flow between the both partners is made by linking all the building blocks together through a single line of reasoning. Use post-its to describe the elements of your partnership. If multiple value elements are involved in a partnership, then you can use color coding of post-its to connecting lines of value exchange.

Another important feature built into the design of the partnership canvas is that it enables communication between a business model and its partnership. The value offer, and created value both have links to the business model of one the partners, and the desired value should relate to an attribute of the other partner.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the partnership canvas is designed in such a way that it accommodates the comparison of a partnership from both partners’ perspectives. By laying the foundation of the partnership canvas against each other, you will be able to compare whether:

Your desired value is what your partner is willing to offer
Your offer is the value that a partner desires from you
You have a same framing of the transfer activities, required to connect your values.

The figure below shows how a partnership can be compared from the perspective of two partners, each with their own business model. By comparing two perspectives, prospecting partners can sense each other out early, and also learn from each other on the various opportunities that exist. Also, they can find out early on whether there actually is a partnering perspective in the first place. This might be a painful realisation to make, but it could save a lot of more hurt from a painful divorce in the future.

Conclusion
The partnership canvas creates empathy between two prospective partners on the strategic importance of the partnership to each. The canvas can be used as a stand-alone tool to quickly identify a partnering opportunity. But for full strategizing value, it’s better to use it in conjunction with the business model canvas.

The partnership canvas has been tested in various workshop settings with students and entrepreneurs. It has demonstrably contributed to better partnership discussions. Parties become clear about each other’s strategic objectives. Also, they learn from each other about the various opportunities there are to partner. It’s not a matter of making one grand master plan for an offer the partner can’t refuse, but more of finding out together what the opportunities are.

Stay tuned for more guidelines on how to use the partnership canvas on this blog. You can freely download, and use the partnership canvas [SlideShare login required, or send me an email: info@partnershipcanvas.com. The tool is published under a creative commons license, so it’s free, but please review back to the source. I hope to hear from your experiences!

Interested to learn more about Partnership Design?

Check out Training opportunities!

You can join the Partnership Design Linkedin group!

Further inquiries? Send an email to: info@partnershipcanvas.com

Word of thanks
I couldn’t have developed this tool without the help of some special people. First I would like to thank my colleagues and students at Wageningen University for creating opportunities to test out the canvas. Next, I would like to thank Mike Lachapelle for some really foundational feedback on the design of the canvas, and Salim Virani for some interesting pointers on shapes. Lastly, a huge thanks goes out to Ernst Houdkamp, whose visual thinking skills kept me sharp on finding improvements for the canvas, and who had the patience to stick with me through the many iterations of the tool.

Ambition is what drives many of the entrepreneurs and researchers I work with in creating new business models. And ambition creates the right kind of energy to start shifting boundaries in the thinking of possibilities. Yet ambition is also what can create problems with business model innovation, particularly in overestimating idea potential overlooking the need for critical testing, over-hypothesizing business model mechanics, and last but not least underestimating the long run and grit that is needed to pitch up a business model in the wild. I recently did some research on an interesting case that shows just how complex it is to achieve a promising business model, and how modesty in approach, and incremental improvement paved the way to a highly robust business model for a platform in the medical sector.

Glooko
I had to advise a consortium of organizations on the joint development of an app for (pre) diabetic people. The first thing I do in these kind of cases is to look for a compelling precursor, and that was an app named Glooko. Digging into the history of how this app developed, I found 4 very powerful lessons to learn for entrepreneurs facing the business model challenge. These lessons regard points I usually see going wrong because people take to their business model designs overzealously.

The Glooko iPhone app

1. The parsimony of the initial value proposition
All diabetics are requested to keep a logbook of their blood sugar levels, caloric intake, and exercise. Glooko started off with just that, the simple hypothesis that its users would find more value in keeping their logs on a smartphone (launching initially on the iPhone) instead of on paper. They started with something simple, which could be validated and expanded on, rather than starting with a feature-laden product for a too wide a range of customers that would swamp learning and iterative development.

At the time there were a couple of competing logbook apps on the app store, but they all required manual input. So, the innovation with which Glooko launched in 2010 was a glucose meter synchronisation cable that could read data from blood glucose meters, making registry more easy and accurate. The app was free, like the other apps, but the cable cost 40 dollars. Glooko thus bypassed the most common innovation myth that you need to create something completely new and unexpected to build an invincible product. Rather they built something users were already familiar with, and solved a major problem at launch that they could immediately start generating revenue with.

2. Gradual refinement and expansion of features
Based on the initial value proposition, Glooko started building additional functionalities. The first was becoming more sharp about its metrics and analytics by making the glucose synchronization cable connectable to a wider range of commonly used glucose meters. This turned the app into a prime data aggregator through synchronization over various metering devices. Also they linked to actual supermarket and restaurant food product databases, to feed into the app’s caloric consumption input registry. This way the app could provide more accurate data input and readings overall.

When Glooko achieved FDA approval on the cable in 2012, they were allowed to provide data analytics and graphing, so that patients now could better monitor and plan their regimes, and share their data with their clinician. Launching the app on the Android platform at that time also expanded the reach. And currently they are taking things even further into predictive analytics. The beauty is that everything expands based on gradual learning, rather than cluttering the learning process with too many learning objectives at once.

3. Taking time to create a platform community
Before FDA approval, users could share only their data with clinicians via email or PDF’s. Even though this wasn’t ideal, it was the first step towards creating a platform. After FDA approval, Glooko enabled clinicians to access their patient’s data through a web app that used analytics. Patients and doctors could now have a better conversation on the patient’s health status and progress.

But this was apparently only the beginning of the social mechanics that this app could achieve. Currently, Glooko is exploring the possibilities for predictive analytics in partnership with a renowned diabetics research organisation, to help insurance agencies and hospitals estimate the local prevalence of diabetics. This helps these customers to better optimise their service and staffing capacities, based on the needs locally, and could be the big revenue stream that will turn Glooko into a profit making machine. This development of social functionality is very much in line with the excellent advice that was recently posted by Andrew Chen on building platforms. The irony is that you don’t build a platform by starting with building a platform!

4. The lean approach to customer acquisition
Currently Glooko has 20 people on board, with only a couple in the sales force. I think there are two factors that can keep their sales force this lean. For one I found Glooko myself by using Google, prompted by a notion that “there must be an app for that”. That’s all it took. Secondly, I suspect that they can ride a wave of clinician referrals to real in new hospital accounts and insurers. What also helps here is the recent partnership with the diabetics research organization to bolster credibility on the analytics of the value proposition. However this may turn out in the future, it is an incredible feat that they have come so far with minimal acquisition activities. It will be interesting to see how far they can take it.

Conclusion
The Glooko case is a very rich learning case on business model innovation. I will use it often when trying to explain about the business model innovation process, and syncing everybody’s expectations on what will be required to search for and develop a new business model. If you’re interested to use this case yourself, I’ve included it in a presentation below, visualising the business model iterations. I’m keen to have any further thoughts and reflections!

Glooko business model from doorn018

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