Reflection 2 – The Business Canvas

The Business Canvas project gave me a chance to study and observe a business from a different perspective.  Usually when I look at a business, I see it as a whole: I consider it as an entity that delivers value to its customers while making a profit.  To me, all of the components that make a business viable such as the key partners, key activities, customer relationships and segments, cost structure and revenue streams were always a given and were taken for granted.  I never thought of breaking down the business to study and explore the different components of a business in detail, which was precisely what I had to do for this project.  It turned out to be more difficult than I imagined.  Of course, getting the information was easy; Colin provided us with all of the information that we needed.  The difficult part was seeing the connection among the different segments.  My partner and I knew that they were all connected somehow since they make up the business together but we struggled to figure out how.

I felt that the way that the initial Business Canvas was laid out hindered us in our search for the connections.  We felt like we had to stick to the model that we were given and we became more and more frustrated as we realized the model just did not work for the company we were working with.  It was when we started drawing arrows back and forth across the sheet and eventually decided to dismantle the canvas that we began to see how each component of the business was connected to another to make up Rain City Strategies.  After seeing the links, we decided to come up with our own model of the Business Canvas for the company with the Key Activities working as the main connector in the middle.

In trying to figure out the relationship among the different parts lay one of the biggest lessons that I learned from this project: every business works differently.  It is so obvious that I often do not even think about it but I was reminded of it when I realized that the business canvas that may have worked perfectly for another business did not work for Rain City Strategies.  I, however, think this lesson could have been delivered better and the restrictions of the original Business Canvas could have been mitigated, had we been instructed to work with a few different companies.  It would have forced us to design different types of canvases for each company and led us to clearly realize that each business model is very different from one another.

This project was also neat in that we got to work with the CEO, Colin, himself and witness the passion that he has for what he does.  Even though Colin is not of Aboriginal background, he saw that the Aboriginal communities are not being respected as they should be and realized that he could work as a broker to bring the communities and private businesses together and create value for all parties involved.  He is what Verganti calls an interpreter in “Design-Driven Innovation.”  Colin’s business is a constant repeat of the three spaces of design projects suggested by Tim Brown – Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.  Rain City Strategies consultants, inspired by the information and knowledge acquired through their sources, come up with project ideas to solve existing problems.  They, then, implement the ideas, sometimes to find out that they do not work and other times to see huge success and thereby delivering value.  Although it is very time consuming and sometimes risky, Colin continues to do what he does because he knows it is the right thing to do.  It was inspiring to work with and learn from him.