The Ed-Tech Offering’s 3D Canvas
Increasingly dynamic business environments require higher levels of coordination. And one of the best ways of guiding both product development and go-to-market efforts is through a canvas that captures not only the required key functional blocks, but also the flows through which value is created.
In 2012, inspired by my product marketing work at Apollo Education Group, I developed a need-based product model canvas that provides a structured functional perspective on education technology (ed-tech). In essence, the canvas captures the student’s needs or jobs-to-be-done, thus providing a map with placeholders for a product to be assembled and defined (i.e., modeled).
Further, this student-centric way of thinking about an ed-tech product also reveals the architectural needs that make the product and its features functionally possible. That leads to a three-dimensional (3D) canvas inside which products, competitors, or entire industries can be mapped and (strategically) positioned.
The Ed-Tech Offering’s 3D Canvas was first detailed and published in the 33-slide presentation “Unlocking Innovation in Education through Meaningful Technology (A General Model for Ed-Tech),” which also includes a few interesting predictions. (The images above are actual slides excerpted from the presentation.)
Posted first on SlideShare (August 21, 2012), the presentation was accompanied by the following three essays, which were published in various ed-tech outlets (and then on Cristian Mitreanu’s LinkedIn Blog) shortly after:
This concept of 3D canvas for the ed-tech offerings has later been developed into a more general perspective on products and platforms, as it was articulated in the Ofmos blog posts “The 3D Product Model Canvas: Thinking and Strategizing in Volumes” and “Generic Platforms in the Product Context“ (from which the image below has been excerpted).
