Roger Martin on business model design thinking
Everything’s connected, especially in this little world of business model design thinking.
Both Ralf Beuker and Alex Osterwalder pointed me to this video interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman Business School (publishing a fine journal as well, see e.g. here, for BMID-design-coverage see more here or here).
… where he talks about innovation, management, strategy and holistic, integrative thinking.
Then, today Victor Lombardi announces some new courses he’s planning this summer, like e.g. this one “Using Internet Business Strategy“:
Business strategy for the Internet can be radically different from other industries, as well as more fun and inventive. And creating a sustainable competitive advantage on the Internet can rely more on what we do tactically in design, marketing, and technology. This class will introduce the topic of business strategy and illustrate how Internet strategy is practiced by online and traditional companies. In class we’ll discuss how Internet strategy applies to our particular situations and create our own fictional business by applying a particular strategic method.
While I am all for applying design thinking to business I am reserved about discriminating strategy and “internet strategy”, because I don’t think that there are many offline businesses left. Today all businesses have to cope with contexts that are rapidly shifting, need to adapt continuously, employ innovative ways of innovating etc. …
And that’s not all. Supporting and enhancing productivity with internet-based instruments is both a challenge and an opportunity (as is enterprise 2.0, knowledge management 2.0, etc.). Combining both design thinking and complexity management approaches (building on the principles of connectivity, adaptivity and emergence), is the theoretical underpinning of my consulting work.
Besides, I like Victors approach to teaching and tutoring. Letting participants not only discuss different business models (or particular strategies, structures or capabilities) but helping and coaching them in designing fictional (or real-life case based) business models is in my experience both a cool and a smart way of doing a workshop.
