Additions to business model canvas for social ventures

Ted Ladd, Professor, Social and Internet Entrepreneurship, Hult International Business School

Additions to consider for social business model canvas are: the government regulation, the affected harm and the affected benefit.

The government regulation

In many social ventures they're operating in places where there perhaps is no government regulation or if there is, it is precarious and perhaps dynamic. It's moving, so an entrepreneur needs to understand what is the existing regulation, and what could happen to the regulation in future.

The affected harm and the affected benefit

We all as social entrepreneurs need to recognize that our goal is to leave the local community better off, than when we found it. So we need to explicitly recognize the affected harm, the pre versus post benefit we're going to create. We also need to recognize that even if we have good intentions, we're going to create problems. A social venture canvas needs to recognize that there are possible consequences. That doesn't invalidate the reason for creating the venture, it does however require some explicit planning upfront.

This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘social entrepreneurship’ offered by Copenhagen Business School through Coursera (2014).