The Black Box Canvas™

Innovation teams and data scientists keep running into the same discussion: “We’re doing this technically perfectly, but are we solving the right problem?” That’s why Joachim De Vos developed the Black Box Canvas™ — a simple, disciplined framework that keeps business and data teams aligned before the technical work begins.

The core idea is deliberately radical: a sharp separation between input and output, with everything in between treated, for now, as a black box. As a manager, you don’t need to understand deep mathematical methods — you focus on what actually makes a difference. Only once three fundamental questions are clearly answered (What should concretely come out? What exactly goes in? What business value emerges if this works?) does it make sense to talk about algorithms and architecture.