Collaboration Model Canvas : Using the Business Model Canvas to Model Productive Collaborative Behavior

The pervasiveness of collaboration in today's knowledge intensive organizations is well documented, based on comprehensive multidisciplinary research efforts spanning more than 15 years. Despite the large and fast growing body of research demonstrating the potential benefits of improved collaboration, ineffective and inefficient collaboration patterns are still undermining the competitiveness of many businesses. To address this, several frameworks have been developed to assess compliance with known collaboration success factors, and analyze collaboration barriers and associated solutions. However, despite promising results, these frameworks are still mostly used by external consultants or researchers with prior experience from collaborative performance improvement projects or initiatives, while their use (without external involvement) is still limited in most industrial companies. Consequently, there is a lack of a simple and effective methodological framework that can be applied without external assistance, based on existing research and supported by empirical evidence. This paper presents a DIY (Do It Yourself) modeling framework based on the Business Model Canvas - the Collaboration Model Canvas (CMC). The CMC is suitable for both ad hoc and established collaborations across companies, co-working spaces, incubators, science/business parks and business networks - in particular for those that are already familiar with business modeling and the Business Model Canvas. Furthermore, the appropriateness of the framework has been successfully validated in a simple case study in a master level class. The paper describes the framework, presents and discusses the results and presents some initial conclusions before outlining some directions for future research.