Entrepreneurship Research Guide : Business Model
This guide is a collaborative effort between the Wisconsin School of Business and the Business Library.
One: Describe the business model
- How will you earn revenue?
- What will it cost to acquire customers?
Two: Sharpening the ability to develop a business model
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Characterize the customer value proposition: Will you help customers get more done? Will you save them time? Money? Will you overcome their lack of skills or access to information/resources?
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Making money: Describe the customer segment (demographic data, behaviors). How you will reach them? What kind of relationship you will have to them?
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Costs: What resources (people, land, equipment) do you require? What activities will you perform to make your product/service? Do you need any partners?
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Why won’t a competitor copy your product/service?
Three: Sample techniques/frameworks
- Business Model CanvasBusiness Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm's or product's value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances. It assists firms in aligning their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs.
Suggested readings
Business Model Generation by ISBN: 9780470901038Publication Date: 2010-07-23Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"
Library Resources
- U.S. Census BureauCensus data for the United States and Puerto Rico from 2000-present. Includes the Decennial Census, the American Community Survey, and the Economic Census, among other surveys. Download data or create thematic maps from any table that displays more than one geography of the same type (state, county, etc.).
Access: Available to everyone. - ReferenceUSA (Infogroup)Provides access to information on U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers. The business database includes data such as employee size, sales volume, geo-codes for mapping, contact details, franchise and brand information, judgments and bankruptcies, and credit rating scores. The consumer database includes comprehensive demographic and lifestyle attributes for any type of marketing or research.
Access: Available to anyone on-campus. Available off campus for UW-Madison students, faculty and staff only.