Business Model Types

What you will learn

• Survey twelve business model archetypes open to researchers, from consulting, productized services, and SaaS to data, platforms, training, publishing, licensing, non-profits, PROs/CROs, government contracts, and hybrids
• Answer the three questions every model must: who pays, what job they are hiring you to do, and what the unit of value is
• Understand the non-obvious payer: why the beneficiary, the payer, and the decision-maker are often three different people
• Shortlist the two or three archetypes that best fit your expertise and situation

The Three Questions Every Business Model Must Answer

There are three questions that every business model answers:

Who pays? There are different models for who pays depending on the business model. The payer is not always the person who benefits, for instance, health insurance pays for care that patients receive. Google's advertisers pay for access to users who don't pay. A grant-funded NGO is paid by donors to serve a community that never transfers money. It is important to look at who is paying for what in each business model.

What job are they hiring you to do? People typically hire folks to do a job. A pharmaceutical company doesn't hire a bioinformatician to "analyse data." They hire them to reduce the time between target identification and a go/no-go decision. A conservation organisation doesn't hire an ecologist to "monitor species." They hire them to produce defensible evidence that a court or regulator will accept. The job-to-be-done is almost always more specific than it appears, and the right model flows from understanding it precisely. Knowing what the job is, is helpful in determining how valuable the business model is.

What does the unit of value look like? Are you selling time? A deliverable? Access? An outcome? A subscription? Each answer implies different economics, different risks, and different strategies.

The Archetypes

These are not the only business models that exist. They are the ones most likely to be relevant to researchers building something for the first time.

We suggest that you skim the table first. Then read the full entries for the two or three archetypes that intrigue, surprised or unsettled you. You do not need to read all twelve at full depth to understand this lesson.

Read three of the twelve in depth. Each archetype below folds its full write-up (who pays, economics, case study, when it works) behind a "Read more" toggle; expand it for the three that intrigue, surprise, or unsettle you most.

Archetype 1: Expert Services (Consulting)

What it is: You sell your time and expertise directly, typically in engagements defined by a scope of work and a deliverable.

Archetype 2: Productized Consulting

What it is: The same expertise, packaged into a defined, repeatable deliverable with a fixed scope and price. You are still selling expertise, but you are not selling open-ended time.

Archetype 3: Software as a Service (SaaS)

What it is: You build a software tool and charge users (or their organisations) recurring fees for access.

Archetype 4: Data as a Service

What it is: Your data is the product. You charge for access, for analysis, or for specific extracts.

Archetype 5: Platform and Marketplace

What it is: You build an infrastructure that connects two (or more) groups who need each other, and capture value from facilitating that connection.

Archetype 6: Training and Education

What it is: You sell the ability to do what you know how to do: through workshops, online courses, bootcamps, certification programmes, or institutional training contracts.

Archetype 7: Publishing and Media

What it is: You build an audience by publishing about what you know, then monetise that audience through subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate revenue, or by converting readers into consulting or course clients.

Archetype 8: Licensing and Royalties

What it is: You create something once (a patent, a copyrightable method, a software library, a branded curriculum) and license others the right to use it, receiving royalties on each use.

Archetype 9: Non-Profit and Social Enterprise

What it is: A mission-driven organisation that earns revenue through grants, donations, government contracts, and earned income, and uses that revenue to pursue a defined social or environmental mission.

Archetype 10: Contract Research Organisation (CRO)

What it is: You sell research capacity: the ability to run experiments, generate data, and produce results for clients who cannot or do not want to maintain that capacity internally.

Archetype 11: Government and Institutional Contracts

What it is: You win competitively tendered contracts from government agencies, research institutions, or international bodies to do defined work.

Archetype 12: Hybrid and Portfolio Models

What it is: Most viable ventures eventually combine two or more of the above archetypes in ways that support each other.

The Non-Obvious Payer: The Most Important Thing In This Lesson

The payer in your business model is not always the person who benefits from your work. This is one of the most powerful insights when building a research-based venture.

Example 1: Conservation science. The beneficiary of biodiversity monitoring is the ecosystem and the communities that depend on it. They cannot pay. The payer might be: a government with environmental obligations, a company with a biodiversity net gain commitment, an NGO funded by donors who care about conservation, or (increasingly) a carbon or biodiversity credit market. Understanding who pays changes what you build and who you sell to.

Example 2: Public health research. The beneficiary of disease surveillance is the population. They don't pay. The payers are government health agencies, international health organisations, pharmaceutical companies building vaccines, and insurance actuaries modelling risk. The same research can be sold to multiple payers who are hiring it for completely different jobs.

Example 3: Clinical decision support. A diagnostic tool benefits the patient. But the patient doesn't choose the tool and often doesn't pay for it. The payer is the hospital or clinic. The purchaser (who decides to buy) is the clinical department head or procurement committee. The user (who operates it) is the clinician. These are three different people with three different jobs to be done and three different things they need to be convinced of. A product that only addresses one of them will struggle.

Example 4: Education. The beneficiary of a training programme is the researcher who attends it. But the payer might be their employer, a professional society, a government workforce development programme, or a research funder who has decided that training is part of what they fund. Each payer has different requirements for what the training must demonstrate.

The exercise in the challenge asks you to map the full triangle: who benefits, who pays, and who decides. Getting all three right is not easy. But not thinking about all three is one of the most common reasons ventures fail to find a sustainable model.

Reflection Prompts

1. Which archetype made you think "I could see myself doing something like that"? Name the specific detail in that case study (the number, the client type, the economics) that made it feel real, not just appealing.
2. Who actually pays for the work you currently do (directly or through grants)? Who benefits? Are they the same people?
3. If you could only choose one archetype to explore further after this programme, which would it be, and what in your current situation (a client, a dataset, a skill) makes it plausible, not just attractive?

Discussion 1: The Model Gallery Walk (15 min)

Discussion 2: The Payer Triangle (15 min)

Discussion 3: The Same Expertise, Different Model (10 min)

Discussion 4: The Uncomfortable Model (10 min)

Discussion 5: The Portfolio Sketch (10 min)

This challenge produces a Business Model Canvas sketch. It is intentionally rough. A rough sketch that surfaces real questions is more valuable than a polished document that hides them.

Part 1: The Payer Triangle (10 min)

Draw three boxes: Beneficiary, Payer, Decision-Maker.

For the work you are most interested in building, name the entity in each box. If the same entity appears in more than one box, that is useful information (it simplifies your model). If all three are different, that is also useful information (it means you have three different stakeholders to address).

For each box, answer: what does this party primarily care about? What would make them say yes?

Part 2: The Model Shortlist (10 min)

List the three archetypes from the pre-work that interest you most. For each, write two sentences: what would this look like applied to your specific expertise, and what is the main obstacle you can currently see with that model?

Then:

• Cross out the one that is least likely to work in the next 12 months.
• Circle the one that you think is most likely to work.

Capture the output of this work below:

Part 3: The Unit of Value (10 min)

For your leading archetype, describe the unit of value you would sell. This is not a description of your expertise, it is the specific thing a client would pay for and receive.

Examples of well-defined units:

• "A three-day on-site assessment resulting in a written report of no more than 20 pages, delivered within four weeks of engagement."
• "Annual subscription access to a database of [specific data], updated quarterly, including an annual briefing call."
• "A five-day workshop for up to 12 participants covering [specific curriculum], delivered at the client's location."

If you cannot describe the unit of value in one sentence, that is a signal that the model needs more definition before it can become a business.

Part 4: The Non-Obvious Question (15 min)

Write answers to these three questions:

1. Who is paying for your expertise right now, even if indirectly? (Your grant funder, your employer, the taxpayer, a foundation.) What are they trying to accomplish by funding you?
2. If you moved to a direct commercial model, which of the twelve archetypes most closely resembles what that funder is already paying for? Could you offer the same value directly to a different payer?
3. What would you charge? Be specific. What is a price point that feels uncomfortably high to you? Discomfort at your own price is often a signal you are getting closer to the right price, not that you are overcharging.

Part 5: Bring It Forward (5 min)

Write one sentence about the model you want to explore after this programme, at a level of specificity that would let someone else give you useful feedback on it.

Not: "I'm interested in consulting." Instead: "I want to offer paid statistical design reviews to small clinical research teams in New Zealand and Australia, priced at $2,500-4,000 per engagement, targeting teams who are 3-6 months from submitting a trial protocol."

That sentence is what you will bring to your 90-day planning session on Day 2.

Key Concepts Reference

Archetype: a repeatable pattern for how a business creates and captures value. Most viable ventures combine elements of more than one archetype.

Payer vs. beneficiary: the entity that pays for a product or service is often distinct from the entity that benefits from it. Mapping both (and the decision-maker who sits between them) is essential to understanding why a model does or does not work.

Unit of value: the specific, describable thing a client pays for and receives. Defining this precisely is a prerequisite for pricing, scoping, and selling.

Productized consulting: consulting services packaged into a defined, repeatable deliverable with a fixed scope and price, allowing faster delivery and higher margins than open-ended time billing.

Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD): a framework for understanding why customers use a product or service, framed as the job they are hiring it to do. The same expertise can be hired to do very different jobs by different customer types, which is why the same research can support multiple business models. JTBD is covered in depth in the Day 2 curriculum.

Portfolio model: a business that deliberately combines two or more archetypes that reinforce each other. Common in research ventures because different revenue streams (consulting, training, publishing, licensing) can share the same underlying expertise while diversifying risk.

Freemium / open core: a model in which a core product is available free (to build community and network effects) and a premium version or enterprise tier is paid. Common in research software. Requires careful design of the line between free and paid to avoid giving away too much value or too little.