DOI: 10.4018/JBE.321556 Journal of Business Ecosystems Volume 4 • Issue 1 This article published as an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and production in any medium, provided the author of the original work and original publication source are properly credited. *Corresponding Author 1 The Electricity System Improvement Canvas (ESIC): A New Tool for Business Model Innovation in the Energy Sector Jordi Vinaixa, ESADE Business School, Spain* Winnie Vanrespaille, ESADE Business School, Spain Hasan Muslemani, ESADE Business School, Spain ABSTRACT This paper addresses the complexity of commercially exploiting technical solutions in ecosystems with many stakeholders or in ecosystems that are highly influenced by regulatory issues. It does so 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. It is normally used together with the value creation ecosystem (VCE), a tool previously developed by the authors, providing more concretion and detail to it. To better portray its functionality, the ESIC and the VCE will be applied to one of the demo projects explored within EU-SysFlex, a project that has to do with congestion problems in the German electricity grid. KEywoRdS Business Model Design, Business Model Innovation, Ecosystem, Electricity Sector, Energy Business Innovation, EU-SysFlex, System Improvement Canvas, Value Creation Ecosystem INTRodUCTIoN While developing innovative business models and exploitation plans for demo solutions of the Horizon2020 EU-SysFlex project 1 , the authors of this paper encountered different issues. Most of these issues originated from the complexity of the ecosystems around those solutions, which made it difficult to exploit them beyond their demo stages. Problems can occur in the exploitation of diverse types of technical solutions in complex ecosystems, due to the need to consider many stakeholders and/or important local regulations. Moreover, these types of solutions are often influenced by public entities and can depend on future regulations. Therefore, it is very important to not only consider all the actors and beneficiaries involved, but also the regulators and other stakeholders whose buy-in might be needed. Moreover, the authors (Vinaixa et al., 2022) previously developed the Value Creation