The business model canvas — as opposed to the traditional, intricate business plan — helps organizations conduct structured, tangible, and strategic conversations around new businesses or existing ones. Leading global companies like GE, P&G, and Nestlé use the canvas to manage strategy or create new growth engines, while start-ups use it in their search for the right business model. The canvas’s main objective is to help companies move beyond product-centric thinking and towards business model thinking.

To start, it lets you look at all nine building blocks of your business on one page:

Each of these nine components contains a series of hypotheses about your business model that you need to test (click or tap for a bigger version):

The canvas is one of the three key principles of the lean start-up approach. For the other two, read Steve Blank’s May 2013 article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.”

 By Alexander Osterwalder, http://blogs.hbr.org