The Electricity System Improvement Canvas (ESIC): A New Tool for Business Model Innovation in the Energy Sector

This paper addresses the complexity of commercially exploiting technical solutions in ecosystems with many stakeholders or that are highly influenced by regulatory issues by introducing a new tool, called the Electricity System Improvement Canvas (ESIC). The ESIC allows for an efficient design, visualization, analysis and/or validation of innovative system solutions and their implementation. Moreover, the ESIC helps to focus on the benefits that the solution provides for the system as a whole and for certain stakeholders. To better portray its functionality, the ESIC will be applied to one of the demo projects explored within EU-SysFlex, concerned with congestion problems in the German electricity grid.