A Novel Business Model Canvas for Research Infrastructures: A Design Science Approach

This paper presents the development of a novel Business Model Canvas (BMC) tailored for the unique context of publicly funded large-scale Research Infrastructures (RIs). While the standard BMC was designed for commercial enterprises, RIs operate as networked and multi-stakeholder organizational forms whose sustainability depends on legitimacy, public value, and long-term governance rather than market transactions alone. The primary purpose of the RI-BMC is to support strategic alignment and sustainability planning across heterogeneous RI stakeholders by making the infrastructure’s value logic, governance dependencies, and financing model explicit; secondarily, it supports communication and legitimation toward funders and partners. Using a Design Science research methodology, we iteratively designed, prototyped, and refined an RI-specific BMC template. This process involved re-conceptualizing key components to better align with the operational realities of RIs. The resulting RI‑BMC retains the familiar nine-block structure as a boundary object, while redefining block semantics and pragmatics to capture stakeholder ecosystems, involvement mechanisms, engagement intensity, and non-commercial financing opportunities. The design choices were validated through a series of stakeholder interviews, which served not only to refine the canvas's content but also as a meta-validation of its adapted structure. The resulting framework was developed within the context of GUIDE (Growing Up in Digital Europe), a pan-European RI collecting data to study children and youth well-being. We demonstrate how the adapted RI-BMC provides a coherent, holistic, and actionable strategic view that effectively bridges scientific objectives with measurable operational KPIs and sustainability planning.