The Triple Layered Business Model Canvas: A Tool to Design More Sustainable Business Models

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The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable
business models
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in Journal of Cleaner Production · June 2016
DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067
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The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more
sustainable business models
Alexandre Joyce a, *, Raymond L. Paquin b
a Institut de developpement de produits, 4805 Molson, Montreal, Quebec H1Y0A2 Canada
b Concordia University, John Molson School of Business, MB 13.125 e Dept. of Management, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8
Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 5 August 2015
Received in revised form
30 May 2016
Accepted 11 June 2016
Available online xxx
Keywords:
Business model innovation
Sustainable business models
Business models for sustainability
Triple layered business model canvas
Triple bottom line
a b s t r a c t
The Triple Layered Business Model Canvas is a tool for exploring sustainability-oriented business model
innovation. It extends the original business model canvas by adding two layers: an environmental layer
based on a lifecycle perspective and a social layer based on a stakeholder perspective. When taken
together, the three layers of the business model make more explicit how an organization generates
multiple types of value e economic, environmental and social. Visually representing a business model
through this canvas tool supports developing and communicating a more holistic and integrated view of
a business model; which also supports creatively innovating towards more sustainable business models.
This paper presents the triple layer business model canvas tool and describes its key features through a
re-analysis of the Nestle Nespresso business model. This new tool contributes to sustainable business
model research by providing a design tool which structures sustainability issues in business model
innovation. Also, it creates two new dynamics for analysis: horizontal coherence and vertical coherence.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The pressure for businesses to respond to sustainability con-
cerns is increasing. Organizations are expected to more actively
address issues such as financial crises, economic and social in-
equalities, environmental events, material resource scarcity, energy
demands and technological development as part of their focus. On
the one hand, those challenges can be seen as an increase in risk
(Tennberg, 1995; Paterson, 2001). On the other, those same chal-
lenges can be seen as opportunities for organizations to engage in
sustainability-oriented innovation (Adams et al., 2015; Hart, 2005;
McDonough and Braungart, 2002). For organizations to succeed,
they must respond to such challenges by creatively integrating eco-
efficient and eco-effective innovations which help conserve and
improve natural, social and financial resources into their core
business (Castello and Lozano, 2011; Rifkin, 2014; Jackson, 2009).
Yet for sustainability-oriented innovation to be truly impactful, it
needs to move beyond incremental, compartmentalized changes
within an organization and towards integrated and integral
changes which reach across the organization and beyond it its
larger stakeholder environment (Adams et al., 2015; Nidumolu
et al., 2009).
For the past 25 years, businesses have been looking at sustain-
ability issues from a far (Dyllick and Hockerts, 2002) without
meaningfully reducing their aggregate resource and energy use.
Most organizational approaches have failed to create necessary
reductions in impact at least, in part, because business thinking has
failed to integrate a more natural sciences-based awareness of
sustainability and the ecological limits to our planetary boundaries
(Pain, 2014; Rockstr€om et al., 2009; Whiteman et al., 2013).
This article proposes the Triple Layer Business Model Canvas
(TLBMC) as a practical tool for coherently integrating economic,
environmental, and social concerns into a holistic view of an or-
ganization's business model. The TLBMC builds on Osterwalder and
Pigneur (2010) original business model canvas e a popular and
widely adopted tool for supporting business model innovation e by
explicitly integrating environmental and social impacts through
additional business model layers that align directly with the orig-
inal economic-oriented canvas. The TLBMC is a practical and easy to
use tool which supports creatively developing, visualizing, and
communicating sustainable business model innovation (Stubbs and
Cocklin, 2008). The TLBMC follows a triple-bottom line approach to
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: [e-mail] (A. Joyce), Raymond.paquin@
concordia.ca (R.L. Paquin).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Cleaner Production
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / j c l e p r o
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067
0959-6526/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2016) 1e13
Please cite this article in press as: Joyce, A., Paquin, R.L., The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable business
models, Journal of Cleaner Production (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067

organizational sustainability (Elkington, 1994), explicitly address-
ing and integrating economic, environmental, and social value
creation as core to an organization's business model. In particular, it
leverages life-cycle analysis and stakeholder management per-
spectives within newly created environmental and social canvases
to conceptualize and connect multiple types of value creation
within a business model perspective.
As a tool, the TLBMC bridges business model innovation (Zott
et al., 2011; Spieth et al., 2014) and sustainable business model
development (Boons and Lüdeke-Freund, 2013) to support in-
dividuals and organizations in creatively and holistically seeking
competitive sustainability-oriented change as a way to address the
challenges facing us today (Azapagic, 2003; Shrivastava and Statler,
2012). The TLBMC can help users overcome barriers to
sustainability-oriented change within organizations (Lozano, 2013)
by creatively re-conceptualizing their current business models and
communicating potential innovations. Sustainability is argued to be
the key driver of creative innovation for many firms and im-
provements towards sustainability requires innovating on existing
business models to create “new ways of delivering and capturing
value, which will change the basis of competition” (Nidumolu et al.,
2009, p.9). While this point is not new, relatively little work sheds
light on tools which may support the creative conceptual phase of
innovating business models towards organizational sustainability.
Through private consulting, organizational workshops, and
university courses, the TLBMC has been found to help users quickly
visualize and communicate existing business models, make explicit
data and information gaps, and creatively explore potential busi-
ness model innovations which were more explicitly sustainability-
oriented. The TLBMC's layered format helped users better under-
stand and represent the interconnections and relationships be-
tween organizations' current actions and its economic,
environmental and social impacts. By developing environmental
and social canvas layers as direct extensions of Osterwalder and
Pigneur (2010) original economic-oriented business model
canvas, each canvas layer provides a horizontal coherence within
itself which also connects across layers, providing a vertical
coherence or more holistic perspective on value creation, which
integrates a view of economic, environmental, and social value
creation throughout the business model. Thus, the TLBMC may
enable users to creativity develop broader perspectives and in-
sights into their organizations' actions.
The TLBMC contributes to this special issue on organizational
creativity and sustainability by proposing a user-friendly tool to
support sustainability-oriented business model innovation. First, as
a multi-layer business model canvas, the TLBMC offers a clear and
relatively easy way to visualize and discuss a business model's
multiple and diverse impacts. Instead of attempting to reduce
multiple types of value into a single canvas, the TLBMC allows
economic, environmental and social value to be explored hori-
zontally within their own layer and in relationship to each other
through the vertical integration of these layers together. This, in
turn, supports richer discussion and more creative exploration of
sustainability-oriented innovations as a way to explore how action
in one aspect of an organization may ripple through other parts of
the organization.
Second, the TLBMC provides a concise framework to support
visualization, communication and collaboration around innovating
more sustainable business models (Boons and Lüdeke-Freund,
2013). As a relatively easy to understand approach to conceptual-
izing organizations, the TLBMC is as a boundary object (Carlile,
2002) to communicate change to diverse audiences. At its core,
the TLBMC may support transitioning from incremental and iso-
lated innovations to more integrated and systemic sustainability-
oriented innovations which are likely better suited to meeting
ongoing global crises, and energy and material constraints (Adams
et al., 2015; Shrivastava and Paquin, 2011; von Weizsacker et al.,
2009). To support future research and practice around
sustainability-oriented business model innovation, the TLBMC is
reproduced in Annex 1 and is available for use under a creative
commons licence.
2. Business models and business model canvases
While the concept of a business model as a “theory of a busi-
ness” is not new (Drucker, 1955), business model research has only
relatively recently gained the attention of many scholars. In fact, as
one recent review noted, scholars “do not [readily] agree on what a
business model is” (Zott et al., 2011, p.1020). However, for this
article a business model is defined as “the rationale of how an or-
ganization creates, delivers and captures value” (Osterwalder and
Pigneur, 2010, p.14). In particular, it is a conceptualization of an
organization which includes 3 key aspects (Chesbrough, 2010;
Osterwalder, 2004):
(1) How key components and functions, or parts, are integrated
to deliver value to the customer;
(2) How those parts are interconnected within the organization
and throughout its supply chain and stakeholder networks;
and
(3) How the organization generates value, or creates profit,
through those interconnections.
When clearly understood, an organization's business model can
provide insight into the alignment of high level strategies and un-
derlying actions in an organization, which in turn supports stra-
tegic competitiveness (Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart, 2010). Given
that such connections are often only tacitly understood within or-
ganizations (Teece, 2010), scholars and practitioners have increas-
ingly turned to business models as a way to make these
connections more explicit (Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002;
Amit and Zott, 2010; Schaltegger et al., 2012). Making explicit
these connections through an organization's business model can
also support business model innovation through the discovery of
previously unseen opportunities for value creation through trans-
forming existing actions and interconnections in new ways
(Johnson et al., 2008).
2.1. A canvas as a creative tool for business model innovation
Business model tools can be used to support sustainability
through outside-in or inside-out approaches (Baden-Fuller, 1995;
Simanis and Hart, 2009; Chesbrough and Garman, 2009). An
outside-in approach involves exploring opportunities for innova-
tion by looking at an organization through different types of
idealized business models, or business model archetypes (Bocken
et al., 2014). This allows firms to explore innovations which may
result from adapting their current business model towards a
particular archetype. Put another way,
“Firms can use one or a selection of business model archetypes for
shaping their own transformation, which are envisaged to provide
assistance in exploring new ways to create and deliver sustainable
value and developing the business model structure by providing
guidance to realise the new opportunities” (Bocken et al., 2014,
p.13).
As an outside-in approach, Business model archetypes allow
users a relatively easy way to explore the potential impacts of
innovating towards different types of business models, inspiring a
A. Joyce, R.L. Paquin / Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2016) 1e132
Please cite this article in press as: Joyce, A., Paquin, R.L., The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable business
models, Journal of Cleaner Production (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067

form of creative confrontation or cross-pollination of diverse ideas
(Fleming, 2004). The cross-pollination of business models ideas
happens when an archetype from one context or industry is rein-
terpreted or applied in another. The term outside-in applies
because an ‘outside’ business model archetype is adapted or
translated to the organization.
Inversly, an inside-out approach to business model innovation
involves starting with the current elements in the organization.
First, one details an organization's existing business model then
explores the potential changes to the model. A business model
canvas (BMC), such as that developed by Osterwalder and Pigneur
(2010) tool can be quite effective here in helping users understand
an organization's business model. The BMC can help users visually
represent of the elements of a business model and the potential
interconnections and impacts on value creation. As a visual tool, the
BMC can facilitate discussion, debate, and exploration of potential
innovations to the underlying business model itself; with users
developing a more systemic perspective of an organization and
highlighting its value creating impacts (Wallin et al., 2013; Bocken
et al., 2014). Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) BMC, in particular, was
developed following design science methods and theory underly-
ing business model development (Osterwalder, 2004) with a focus
on providing accessible, visual representation of a business system
to guide the creative phase of prototyping, gathering feedback, and
revising iterations on business model innovation. Their BMC has
been widely adopted by practitioners (Nordic Innovation, 2012;
OECD et al., 2012; Kaplan, 2012) and researchers (Abraham, 2013;
Massa & Tucci, 2013). Given its wide adoption and ease of use for
multiple types of users, the business model canvas is an ideal
foundation to expand upon by integrating sustainability.
As an example, Fig. 1 shows an interpretation of the Nestle
Nespresso business model through the nine components which
make up Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) original BMC. As discussed
below, their BMC forms the economic layer of the proposed Triple
Layered Business Model Canvas. This is discussed more in section 4.
2.2. Building on the original canvas
The business model canvas, as proposed by Osterwalder and
Pigneur (2010), distills an organization's business model into nine
interconnected components e customer value proposition,
segments, customer relationships, channels, key resources, key
activities, partners, costs and revenues. While using it may help
users align profit and purpose to support more sustainability-
oriented value creation on its own (Osterwalder and Pigneur,
2011), in practice environmental and social value is implicitly de-
emphasized behind the canvas's more explicit ‘profit first’ or eco-
nomic value orientation (Upward, 2013; Coes, 2014). This has led to
the criticism that developing more sustainability-oriented business
models likely either requires an expert facilitator to support this
orientation or a different tool altogether (Bocken et al., 2013;
Marrewijk and Werre, 2003). A new tool would need to more
explicitly integrate economic, environmental, and social value into
a holistic view of corporate sustainability. As a way to put this into
practice, the TLBMC offers the opportunity for users to explicitly
address a triple bottom line where each canvas layer is dedicated to
a single dimension and together they provide a means to integrate
the relationships and impacts across layers.
The triple bottom line (TBL) perspective, advocating organiza-
tions consider and formally account for their economic, environ-
mental, and social impacts (Savitz, 2012), is useful here. While
criticized for simplifying sustainability's complexity (Norman and
MacDonald, 2004; Vanclay, 2004; Mitchell, 2007), many organi-
zations have adopted TBL thinking, implicitly or explicitly, through
corporate social responsibility reporting and initiatives such as the
Global Report Initiative, Carbon Disclosure Project, and others.
Thus, despite its potential flaws, TBL is a relatively widely under-
stood perspective for considering an organization's economic,
environmental, and social and as a conceptual framework for
designing business models to support more sustainable action.
Innovating towards more sustainable business models requires
developing new business models which go beyond an economic
focus to one which generates and integrates economic, environ-
mental and social value through an organization's actions (Bocken
et al., 2013; Willard, 2012). Therefore the structure of the tool leads
to clearly understand and align an organization's actions towards
sustainability at a strategic business model level.
3. Presentation of the triple layered business model canvas
tool
The wide adoption and use of Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010)
Fig. 1. An analysis of Nespresso through Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) original Business Model Canvas, which forms the economic layer of the Triple Layer Business Model Canvas.
A. Joyce, R.L. Paquin / Journal of Cleaner Production xxx (2016) 1e13 3
Please cite this article in press as: Joyce, A., Paquin, R.L., The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable business
models, Journal of Cleaner Production (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067