How to Create a Business Model Canvas in Google Docs

About the Author: David has enjoyed success using lean and agile techniques at several companies in San Francisco and Washington DC. He joined his first dot com startup in 1999 and helped lead it to a 13 million dollar acquisition in 2006.

David’s current focus is bringing startup thinking into large organizations to foster corporate entrepreneurship. He can usually be found writing, speaking and coaching around lean startup, business model generation and kanban.

David’s homepage can be found at http://www.davidjbland.com/

A Business Model Canvas is an easy to use, lightweight and powerful tool for anyone looking to sketch out business models. It is quickly becoming the preferred strategic management tool for start-up organizations.

While it is available in .pdf form from Alex Osterwalder’s site, I couldn’t help but feel that companies could benefit from an online, collaborative version of his template.

So, I asked him…

It only takes a Google Account, a few minutes of your spare time and best of all it’s free.

Create a Google Drawing

Give your drawing a background color

Select the rectangle tool

Draw a large rectangle

Select the line tool and slice the rectangle up into 9 sections

Use the text tool to add in each section label

Include the help text for each section in a lighter gray font color (optional)

Fill in the background color and create the header & footer

Create sticky images in photo editing software

Import the sticky images into the Google Drawing

Drag the images off to the gutter so they do not get in your way

Use the text tool to overlay text onto your sticky

Drag the sticky over to your business canvas

Copy, paste and move the stickies around as needed

I’ve shared the Business Model Canvas I created in this demo if you wish to get a better idea of how it is structured. It is only a guide, and you can customize it in many different ways if you like.