business model innovation design we're on a road to nowhere // on a quest to analyze and explore the design of business model innovations, i.e. 'hideous and hidden things' like organizational structures and capabilities, corporate strategies and all things related // on a yellow brick road with a girl, a lion and a straw-man wasting our time // …

Second part of the Scott Hirsch workshop (first write-up is here: Be like the Internet), as this is actually a business model innovation design issue I will post this here, but will put a note on the frogpond blog too, where most my other Web 2.0 Expo stuff will be collected.

Scott starts with one big hairy question What is a business model? I think and see it as an interrelated bundle of context, strategies, structures and competencies.

Some miscellaneous notes from the second part:

Charts are one way to express a business model, Scott presents a slide of Dangers sidekick business model, concentrating on their specific piece of the value chain – the place where Danger thinks it can contribute most.

Scott talks about generic business models and asks which one of those is generic “Web 2.0”?

Web 2.0 companies are more like a taxi, than a bus (seen on a continuum of strategic position). Taxis are sense & respond, the respond to the market, knowledge is embedded in people/process, they are customizing all the time, they focus on flexibility and … the profit from return and scope).

Talked about the Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen) and conceptualizations of business models. Yes, he’s right 90% of what the standard business press writes about business models is in fact about product innovation, much less about process or cost-structure innovations – not to talk about structural innovations.

Now Scott expands upon designing business models, i.e. applies the innovation cycle to prototyping business models. In fact this is MIG’s approach to business model innovation consulting, sometimes this is about redesigning lenses first:

Telling a new story: analytic look at the existing story, be a little more creative to tell a new story, providing new frameworks for thinking about business models through innovation lenses, then practicing using these lenses.

Scott showed different ways of visualization, like e.g. industry maps.

Innovation Lenses: Opportunitues derived from customer needs

Trends & discontinuities + Latent & unmet need … this leads to innovations (product, services, markets, partners, channels, management). Then compare this to business models (industry orthodoxies + unleveraged assets). Scott offered a lot of examples that I can’t recount all, but think of it as a really cool business model innovation session, packed with short examples (Google Docs& Spreasheets, Basecamp, Netflix, and many more innovative business models that feasted on overseen opportunities and outdated industry orthodoxies).

Five things to remember when doing a inquiry session, and why it’s important to start with failure inquiries. Some really good insights into the shortcomings of human decision making (see posts on related organizational pathologies here).