Inclusive Business Model Canvas
The Inclusive Business Model Canvas keeps the standard Business Model Canvas's blocks but forces you to state the commercial and the social value separately, so neither one gets to hide behind the other.
Nine familiar blocks fill the grid, with two extra ones bolted on at the edge for the impact case.
Reach for this when…
- Your 'impact' story and your business plan live in two different documents that don't agree with each other.
- A funder wants to see the numbers behind the social claim, not just the claim.
- Your customers and the people your product is meant to help aren't the same people, and your canvas doesn't say so.
How to run it
- Write the commercial value proposition and the social value proposition as two separate, testable claims.
- Define who pays and who benefits, and be honest when they're not the same person.
- Fill in partners, activities, resources, channels, relationships, costs and revenue as you would for any business model canvas.
- Add real impact measures as a working cell, not an appendix.
- Test the commercial claim with real customers before you pitch the social one.
A worked example
Situation. Chidinma Okafor runs Ile Clean Cookstoves, a clean-cookstove venture in Lagos, Nigeria, whose smoke-reduction story and business numbers sat in two separate documents that never quite matched up for investors.
Applied. She filled in the inclusive canvas as one sheet, forcing the value proposition cell to state the commercial claim, fuel savings, and the social claim, health, as two separate testable statements rather than one blended pitch.
Result. The fuel-savings claim, tested with thirty households, paid back the stove's price within eight months, and that number, not the smoke-reduction story alone, was what investors backed.
The catch
Splitting value into 'commercial' and 'social' can let a venture quietly under-deliver on one while claiming credit for both. Impact measures are also far easier to fill in than to verify, and the canvas itself can't tell you whether your social claim is even true. It works best alongside real measurement, not instead of it.
If the social value cell would survive being deleted without changing a single business decision, it's decoration, not a business model.
Origin: Adapted from Osterwalder & Pigneur's Business Model Canvas