A framework for characterizing business models applied by forestry service contractors

Forestry service contractors' performance have been found related to how they organize their business. For benchmarking purposes, it is thus of vital importance to have a tool that can capture the relevant characteristics of a firm's business model and structure the information in a useful way. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a well-established tool that has frequently been used to describe business models in other industries than forestry. Thus, the aim of this paper was to identify which of the BMC components are the most relevant when comparing business models applied by forestry service contractors and provide a framework for characterizing their business models in a structured and comparable manner. The research process also identified which questions are critical to capturing the relevant content of the included business model components. The adapted framework was tested by interviewing forestry service market experts in Sweden, Finland, Scotland and Ireland about the business model characteristics in their respective countries. The result was a seven-component BMC framework with a number of key questions associated to each component. The paper concludes that the proposed canvas framework is a structured and practical approach for characterizing business models applied by forestry service contractors.