Designing a Sustainable Future: Insights from Crafting ELEXIA’s Business Model

Vasia Schoina | October 13th 2025

Designing a Sustainable Future: Insights from Crafting ELEXIA’s Business Model

Translating ELEXIA's expertise into a scalable model supporting Europe's clean energy transition.

Earlier this year, our innovation team found itself surrounded by post-its, whiteboards, and the buzz of ideas. We were hosting a workshop on the Triple Layer Business Model Canvas (TLBMC) - a framework that pushes you to think how a project delivers value economically, socially and environmentally.

We chose to focus the session on ELEXIA, a Horizon Europe project we’re deeply involved in. The goal was simple but ambitious: to translate ELEXIA’s technical expertise into a business model that supports Europe’s clean energy transition in a sustainable, scalable way.

Connecting Energy, People, and Purpose

At its core, ELEXIA is about integration - bringing together energy systems and facilitating the shift towards digital transition, so that higher levels of control for electricity demand can be achieved. It’s a project that sits at the intersection of digital innovation and sustainability.

Our team’s role touches many fronts: exploitation strategy, communication, dissemination, and some of the technical work, including critical-asset health monitoring within the project’s Energy Management System (EMS).

When we started working on ELEXIA, we knew that technical success alone wouldn’t be enough. To truly make a difference, we needed a clear vision of who benefits, how value is created, and what kind of impact the project leaves behind.

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The Triple Layer Business Model Canvas (TLBMC)

Turning Dialogue into Insight

The TLBMC workshop gave us the perfect opportunity to explore those questions together with the project’s consortium partners.
We designed a questionnaire that would capture their perspectives across all three layers of the canvas - economic, environmental, and social. Instead of a dry survey, it turned into a real conversation.

To guide the discussion, the innovation team introduced consortium partners to the specific methodology, which covered:

• Economic aspects such as customer segments and revenue streams.

• Environmental perspectives including lifestyle impacts and sustainable resources.

• Social dimensions such as affordability and equity.

Futhermore, the strategy for consolidating partners’ inputs inputs, was thoroughly presented, explaining how their responses would be clustered and translated into a holistic business model for ELEXIA.

Following the workshop,  the questionnaire was distributed to all consortium members to gather their responses.  The collected responses formed the foundation of a consolidated analysis, which was later integrated into the project’s Sustainable Business Models. The results revealed significant findings across all three TLBMC layers - Economic, Environmental, and Social - providing a clear picture of how ELEXIA delivers value at multiple levels.

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The Methodology of the Triple Layer Business Model Canvas (TLBMC)

What We Learned Along the Way:  The Economic Insights

From an economic point of view, partners saw strong potential in industrial consumers, municipalities, and utilities as the most relevant customer groups but also noted the growing importance of prosumers and households as energy markets decentralise.

Subscription‑based access to digital services emerged as a primary revenue stream, complemented by licensing fees for software, transaction commissions from energy trading and monetisation of flexibility services. For example, predictive algorithms for demand‑response management were highlighted as a concrete tool that can both lower operational costs and generate income through grid balancing.

The Environmental Impact – Technology with a Purpose

On the environmental side, the conversation circled back to one thing: alignment with Europe’s Green Deal. Partners highlighted how ELEXIA could actively reduce carbon emissions through optimisation algorithms and enable more renewable integration by coordinating electricity, heating and mobility systems .

There was also interest about green ICT - from low-energy data centres to cloud platforms powered by renewables. Circularity emerged as a recurring theme: using recyclable IoT devices, eco-designed meters, and reconditioning protocols for hardware to cut waste and extend equipment lifespans.

The Social Dimension – Empowering People, Building Trust

The Social Layer underlined ELEXIA’s capacity to create positive societal change. Energy affordability and equity were recognised as critical outcomes, with tools like gamified dashboards providing households with clear feedback on costs and CO2 savings. Community empowerment was seen in the possibility of peer‑to‑peer energy exchange and participatory governance of local grids, fostering active energy citizenship. The partners’ responses also pointed to job creation in the digital and green sectors, supported by training programs and skills development in areas such as IoT installation, EMS operation and AI‑driven analytics. Moreover, the social model stressed the importance of digital literacy campaigns, ensuring that all users – including vulnerable groups – can engage with the platform, make informed decisions and actively contribute to the energy transition. Strong governance values such as transparency, data protection and ethical AI design were also highlighted as essential to building trust and inclusivity. 

 

Looking Ahead

The workshop did more than just gather information - it gave the consortium a shared language for thinking about value. It also reminded us that sustainability isn’t just a checklist; it’s about connection. Each insight - whether economic, environmental, or social - feeds into the other.

By bringing these threads together, ELEXIA now has a business model that reflects not only what the project does, but what it stands for: innovation with purpose, built on collaboration and care for the future.

 

In a nutshell

Workshops like this one are often where ideas take shape. They turn frameworks into dialogue, and dialogue into direction. For us, the TLBMC session wasn’t just about modelling a business - it was about imagining the kind of energy future we want to help build.