Resources, activities and partners

The left side of the canvas answers one question: what does it take to deliver the value proposition, day after day? Here you find the resources you need, the activities you must master, and the partners who do the rest. This is the engine behind your promise.

Key resources

Key resources are what you must have for the model to work. They usually fall into four groups:

• Human: the right people — developers, salespeople, specialists.
• Physical: premises, equipment, inventory, machines.
• Financial: capital, a credit line, guarantees.
• Intangible (IP): source code, trademark, patents, data and brand.

For a software company the most important resources are often people and source code. For a web shop it may be inventory and logistics. The point is to separate the critical from the nice to have. Airthings, which makes indoor-climate sensors, depends on both hardware expertise and data from its devices — two very different resource types, both critical to their promise.

Key activities

Key activities are the few things the business must do well to deliver the value. Not everything you do is a key activity — keeping the books is necessary, but rarely what decides whether the customer chooses you.

Activities are tightly linked to the value proposition. If the promise is "always up to date and error-free", then product development and operations become key activities. If the promise is "lowest price", then efficient purchasing and logistics become decisive. Ask yourself: if we did only three things excellently, which three would they have to be for the customer to still get the value we promise?

A useful test is to separate the activities you do because they create the value from the activities you do because you have to. Cognite, which supplies industrial software, lives off processing and unlocking data — that is a key activity. Running servers is necessary, but can be outsourced. The more clearly you see this distinction, the easier it becomes to know what to spend your best people on, and what you can safely let others handle.

Key partners

No one builds everything themselves. Key partners are the outsiders you lean on to reduce risk, source resources or perform activities you shouldn't do yourself. They can be suppliers, technology partners, distribution partners or even competitors you collaborate with in one area.

A web shop can outsource payments to Vipps or a payment provider, shipping to Posten or a third party, and operations to a cloud provider — and instead spend its own time on assortment and customer experience. Choosing partners wisely means keeping your core yourself and letting others do the rest cheaper and better. But remember: every partner is also a dependency. If you become entirely reliant on one channel or one supplier, they gain power over your margin.

See the whole canvas together

Now you have seen all nine building blocks. The real value lies in reading them together. The left side (resources, activities, partners, costs) has to match the right side (customers, value, channels, relationship, revenue). If the right side promises something cheap and scalable, but the left side is heavy and manual, the model does not hang together.

A quick test: point at your value proposition and follow the thread. What resources does it require? What activities? What partners? And does the revenue on the right side cover the costs on the left? If you can tell that story with no gaps, you have a coherent model. If you find a gap, you have found something to work on.

This is also where many discover that their model demands too much at once — too many critical resources, too many activities, and too many partners that all have to fall into place at the same time for anything to work. A good early-stage model is often the one that gets the most value out of the least. If you can remove one critical dependency without weakening the promise to the customer, you have made the model both cheaper and more robust.

Do this now

Take your value proposition and list the three most important resources and the three most important activities needed to deliver it. Then mark one thing you could outsource to a partner instead of building yourself. Finally ask: can I afford all this with the revenue the model produces? Write the answer in one sentence.