Key partners, relied-upon.
In context: Stage 04 · Evaluate · Business model canvas
The outside network your model leans on: the suppliers and partners who supply what you have chosen not to do yourself.
Key Partners is the block in the Business Model Canvas for the suppliers and partners that make the model work. It names who you depend on, and for which activities and resources, so the dependencies are visible rather than assumed.
What this block is
In the Business Model Canvas, Key Partners is the network of suppliers and partners that keeps the model running. No business does everything in-house, so this block names the relationships you depend on: who supplies a critical resource, who performs an activity you have chosen not to own, and who reduces a risk you cannot carry alone.
The useful discipline is to be specific about what each partner is actually for. For every name on the list, write down the key activity they perform or the key resource they provide. That turns a vague sense of ‘people we work with’ into a clear map of dependencies, which is exactly what you need before you stress-test the rest of the canvas.
How it applies
For the £149 sourdough proofing box, I mapped four partners the model could not do without. The Stoke-on-Trent ceramic supplier owns the body and the tooling, so they sit at the centre of the cost picture (most of the £38–55 BOM runs through them). The Manchester PCB house supplies the control electronics. The Sourdough School community acts as an audience and channel partner, giving the product a warm route to the right buyers. A fulfilment partner handles pick, pack and despatch for the direct-to-consumer side.
Writing it out this way made the real exposure obvious: lose the ceramic supplier and we lose both the body and the tooling investment, so that relationship needs the most care. In my experience that is the point of the block, not to list contacts, but to see which dependencies actually carry the model.
Where it fits
Key Partners is one of the nine blocks of the Business Model Canvas, sitting under Stage 04 Evaluate and feeding the Business model diagram alongside the other eight. Read on its own it lists suppliers; read against the diagram it shows how the cost and activity side of the model hangs together.
Try it yourself
Take your own idea and list the three partners it cannot launch without, then write down the one activity or resource each provides. The one you would struggle hardest to replace is the dependency to watch. Start the Free Sprint →
The Business Model Canvas is the work of Strategyzer (Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur), shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence. Source: strategyzer.com.
— Next block → Key activities