Testimonials

What People Are Saying

Arnfinn Lundberg Bakke
Arnfinn Lundberg BakkeActing Head of Sustainability, Innovation Norway, Oslo, Norway
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"Innovation Norway, the national innovation agency, is choosing to standardize on using the Flourishing Business Canvas in our business modelling activities with our clients across the country – both startups and established enterprises. We reached this decision after 3 years of extensive research and piloting the Flourishing Business Canvas in our organization. We were searching for a better business modelling tool, one that included factors relevant to Norwegian business today – societal, environmental and economic. We concluded that the Flourishing Business Canvas was the best available tool. We’re excited to be joining the community from around the world who are using this canvas, and hope to learn and plan to contribute to this community."

Testimonials for the Flourishing Business Canvas

"When working with our 120 member companies we have found the Flourishing Business Canvas useful when the leadership teams of our member companies are doing business strategy and modelling. The canvas is particularly useful as it integrates triple bottom line aspects into a single tool. While it requires work to grasp, our senior leaders appreciate such a forward looking canvas, and find it helps them developing their thinking about the connections between business, society and the environment. "
Jan Helge Viste
Manager for Digitalization and Business Development, GCE NODE, Kristiansand, Adger, Norway
"I have used the Flourishing Business Canvas extensively in workshops I held lead with the leadership teams of the GCE NODE member companies, as well as in my strategy consulting work with other businesses. I find that the canvas enables leaders of established businesses, entrepreneurs and their advisors to develop strategies that integrate social, environmental and financial performance because it gives a good understanding of the full context of and perspectives on any business."
"I am training / coaching or consulting with entrepreneurs and business owners and use the Flourishing Business Canvas to get an overall understanding of their businesses or their future plans fast. The Canvas provides an innovative framework, new language and the structure to shape stories that turn ideas into businesses that has the potential to generate real systemic impact in our world. The Canvas has helped me in my personal journey of continued and deep exploration of what truly matters in our world, and a growing belief in how business can in fact be an enabler of healing and flourishing futures for all."
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas when I teach about business models and when exploring my own business planning. I find the canvas gives a complete picture of a business and its impacts, and helps me think of areas we don’t usually consider in business planning. My aha moment was when I realized the canvas was helping me think holistically, enabling me to consider key stakeholders I didn’t include before, and consider in detail what value co-creations are possible."
Bibiana Cala
Entrepreneur, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas when I coach leaders of both established businsses and startups. I use it to explore possible business ideas. I find the canvas makes it easier to communicate sophisticated business ideas. My aha moment with the canvas was when I realized it gives an opportunity to understand possible paths from the present situation into a future vision."
Harold Holt
Senior Business Advisor, Petramen AS and CR Group, Arendal, Adger, Norway
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas when I work with businesses to develop new strategies and products. I find the canvas makes it easy to see the big picture."
Carrie Pretorius
Business Manager and Creator, Arendal, Adger, Norway
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas to teach sustainability to management students. While more complex, it is most useful because it includes all three contexts of any enteprise: environment, social and economic. My aha moment with the canvas when I realized it integrated many aspects of businesses that I already knew in a systematic way."
Adélie Ranville
PhD Student, enrolled at Grenoble Ecole de Management, Grenoble, France
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas to model new technology based businesses. I find that the canvas makes stakeholders think beyond financial profit and provokes them to think about sustainability in all aspects of business models."
Alecxandro Pellin
Masters Student, Federal University of Technology – Paraná, Toledo, Brazil
"I find the Flourishing Business Canvas helps different departments in established organizations get on the same page and have a common view of their current business operations. I regularly find the business leaders I work with having aha moments as they better understand their stakeholders, partners, and the value they co-create with them. One client now uses their current business model, described using the Flourishing Business Canvas, as the basis for training new employees. Sustainability is complex, and it is easy to get lost and stuck with the competing interests of different stakeholders. In this regard I find the Flourishing Business Canvas useful because it is possible to tell stories across different disciplines like social, environmental and economic value co-creation, stakeholder management, communications and partnerships on a single canvas.

The two most valuable things I have learned from using the canvas are: (1) its ability to build awareness of the critical topics that must be considered to set out a useful course of action toward the future; it is pointless to have great progress in the wrong direction. (2) its focus on a stakeholder approach, using the canvas to explore stakeholder relationships with the stakeholders themselves; This builds an understanding of how every business is interconnected and interdependent, how individual relationships matter, and how the organization can play its role in solving system wide issues that can’t be addressed by one firm alone.

After using the Flourishing Business Canvas I’ve heard people say “finally people get my business, and in return I get useful suggestions to help me with my strategy”.
Kristian F.L. Amile
Advisor, Bouvet, Norway
"I use the Flourishing Business Canvas extensively in educational settings with masters-level students, as well as in mixed groups of students and practitioners. The canvas is useful because it explicitly includes the multi-stakeholders perspective, the systems perspective (society, environment, economy), and multiple values perspective. It helps “lift” the focus beyond the focal firm and the traditional supply chain as well as beyond the customer / user of the product/service.

The canvas provides a very good ground for dialogue and proactive risk management by considering, for example, value co-destruction. By thinking about multiple values (social, economic and environmental), it helps to uncover biases towards one or the other values, which enables business designers to explicitly/proactively addressing those biases. Each stakeholder (student and practitioner) is entering the dialogue, enabled by the canvas, bringing their values and worldviews. The canvas facilitates sense-making of the stakeholders and the process of reaching a unifying joint understanding."
Maya Hoveskog
Associate Professor, Halmstad University, School of Business, Innovation and Sustainability, Halmstad, Sweden
"The Flourishing Business Canvas is useful when I work with a mixed group of stakeholders committed to a collaborative design process. I find that the canvas forces enterprise designers to think through: the critical relationships required to co-create value and that may lead to value co-destructions; and think in terms of total systems value of the enterprise (social, environmental and economic).

My aha moment when using the Flourishing Business Canvas was the realization that most people have a very limited understanding of the key elements required to describe a business model, let alone a sustainable business model. Further, I experienced my clients having their own aha moment when, through their own exploration, they realized the implications of layering in the social and environmental considerations. I have found facilitating this realization is very satisfying from a participatory design perspective."
Stephen Davies
Co-founder, Transformation by Design – Toronto, Ontario, Canada